Tag Archives: Von Freeman

Today is the 85th birthday of Ahmad Jamal, whose approach to orchestrating the piano trio format has had a deep impact on the development of jazz language since the middle-1950s. I’m sharing here the pre-final-edit version of a feature article that I wrote about Mr. Jamal for DownBeat in 2002 in conjunction with the release of InSearch Of…Momentum. The interviews that I drew on in writing this piece — and a few that didn’t make the cut — are found in this post from four years ago today.

Ahmad Jamal (Downbeat–2002):

“Extended form is because of extended living. I project my life and musical experiences in my writing and performance. I’m 72, and I’ve accumulated some information. Now I’m absorbing all the feedback, and trying to channel it into my present lifestyle. I’m going back to my early roots. All I want is to write my music and learn to perform it. Some things I write require a lot of skill, so I have to learn to play all my compositions, and I practice every day. Sometimes I’ll resurrect a composition that I haven’t done in years, because it fits in that spot. Then I use the same basic structure, although the approach is more musically mature than it was years ago. Why change a good minuet or a good concerto? You just try to interpret as the best you can. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” – Ahmad Jamal, December 2002.
________________________________________

Hearing Ahmad Jamal in the freedom of his autumnal years is one of the great jazz pleasures, as evidenced by the elite cohort of New York pianists who came out on the final night of the maestro’s week-long residence at Iridium last December. With bassist James Cammack and drummer Idris Muhammad dotting all the i’s and crossing all the t’s with precision and panache, Jamal enthralled the likes of Monty Alexander, Harold Mabern, Mulgrew Miller and James Williams with fresh takes on his iconic arrangements of “But Not For Me,” “Poinciana” and “Woody ‘N’ You,” which first appeared on But Not For Me: Live At The Pershing, a recording from 1958 that sold a million copies, spent two years on the top-ten charts, and brought him international fame. For good measure, Jamal brought forth a pile of daunting recent works, which included the twisting, vertiginous opus “Gyroscope,” the Chopinesque waltz “Should I,” and a dramatic Tatum-meets-bebop line called “I’ll Take The 20.”

“Every time I hear Ahmad, I leave totally inspired,” Mabern said not long after the Iridium show. “He plays a three-chord masterpiece before he even sits down on the stool, then he throws up his hands to give a signal, and from that point on it’s magic. It’s his sound, his knowledge of chords, the way he orchestrates from the bottom of the piano to the top. Or the way he’ll play a ballad, where he keeps returning to the bridge in a totally different way each time. And there’s his touch, which I call the Franz Liszt touch. A lot of pianists might have equal technique, but their touch and sound distinguish them. That’s the way Ahmad and Art Tatum are. Ahmad is too deep for some people; a lot of piano players don’t come around because it’s too much piano to handle.”

“Should I” and “I’ll Take The 20” are among eight new compositions that appear on his exhilarating new trio release, InSearch Of…Momentum [Dreyfus], the latest product of a fruitful decade-long collaboration with French producer Jean-Francois Deiber. On the previous albums in the series, often expanding his rhythm section with percussionist Manolo Badrena, Jamal augments the trio with strong, idiosyncratic tonal personalities, interacting with George Coleman on The Essence (Verve/Birdology) and Olympia 2000 (Dreyfus), Stanley Turrentine on Nature (Atlantic), trumpeter Donald Byrd and violinist Joe Kennedy on Big Byrd (Verve/Birdology), and a septet composed of Coleman, Kennedy and guitarist Calvin Keys on a À Paris, a 1996 radio broadcast due for fall release on Dreyfus. On each album, Jamal plays with unfettered imagination and customary authority, projecting deep emotion and a palpable sense of inner balance. He finds ingenious ways to link the repertoire thematically, imparting to each album the feeling of a connected suite.

In Search Of … Momentum is the first of the Deiber series on which Jamal explores only the sonic universe of the piano trio, the configuration he has helped define from his very first recordings in 1951. In truth, it’s hard to overstate his influence on the sound of the post-bop piano mainstream. Miles Davis, Jamal’s most famous acolyte, assigned homework on appropriate rhythm section comportment to Red Garland, Paul Chambers and Philly Joe Jones by sending them to 64th and Cottage Grove for first-hand observations of the Three Strings, Jamal’s trio with guitarist Ray Crawford and bassist Israel Crosby, and his subsequent trio with Crosby and drummer Vernell Fournier. McCoy Tyner, Herbie Hancock, Keith Jarrett, Kenny Barron, Cedar Walton, Mulgrew Miller and Bill Charlap are among the pianists who cite Jamal as a seminal influence, and at early ’90s sessions at Bradley’s, the iconic New York piano saloon, Cyrus Chestnut, Eric Reed and Jacky Terrasson enthusiastically experimented with Jamallian dynamics and orchestrative strategies.

Jamal now lives in rural upstate New York, but he remained in Manhattan after the December Iridium stand to help care for his grandson while his daughter gave birth to her second child. On the night before Christmas Eve I visited him at his hotel, appropriately situated on 52nd Street between Sixth and Seventh Avenues. Relaxed in blue-green plaid pajamas and slippers, wearing a patch over one eye, he stood before his window, where the streetlights on 52nd Street stretched all the way to the Hudson River. Jamal had personalized his room with an electric keyboard and headphones, books of Czerny exercises and torch songs, folios of Billy Strayhorn’s “Lush Life” and Maurice Ravel’s “Le Tombeau De Couperin,” an anthology entitled The Ravel Reader, a supply of green tea and dates, medicine for his diabetes and a Koran.

“I hate the word ‘trio’ now,” Jamal insists. “It’s limiting as to what I do. I like to refer to my ‘small ensemble’ or my ‘large ensemble.’ I travel with my small ensemble a lot, but I’ve done other things as well. Now it’s happening in an exciting fashion because I’m writing more than I had been. I wrote for a large ensemble when I was 10, and I’ve been writing ever since. Basically, I’m a writer and an orchestrator. I like big bands. I listen to Duke Ellington, Billy Strayhorn and Count Basie. I’ve always been a fan of 80 pieces, or 16 pieces; I once wrote for 22 voices. I’m not saying I can do it—I never acquired the skill—but I’ve always been a fan of orchestrations, Ravel and Johnny Mandel, all the things that speak of getting incredible sounds out of an orchestra. I’ve had an orchestra going on in my mind daily for all my life.

“I’ve been shaped by the big band era, by the Gillespie–Parker era, and by the electronic age or whatever we call it, and I project my life and musical experiences in my writing and performance,” he continues. “I’m 72, and I’ve accumulated some information. Now I’m absorbing all the feedback, and trying to channel it into my present lifestyle. Sometimes I’ll resurrect a composition that I haven’t done in years, because it fits in that spot. Then I use the same basic structure, although the approach is more musically mature than it was years ago. Why change a good minuet or a good concerto? You just interpret as best you can. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

* * *

Jamal conceptualized his inner orchestra during his formative years in Pittsburgh. A child prodigy who first made music on the piano at 3, he began formal studies at 7, performed Liszt’s Eroica Etude publicly at 11, and joined Local 471 at 14, the year he matriculated at Westinghouse High School, alma mater of pianists Mary Lou Williams, Erroll Garner and Dodo Marmarosa, where Fritz Reiner brought the Pittsburgh Symphony to play assembly programs. There he played piano in the school’s integrated swing band, while spending evenings on jobs at various Elks Clubs, Masonic Lodges, piano lounges, and dance halls around Pittsburgh. “I’d do algebra during intermission, between sets,” he remarks. “That’s too young. I don’t recommend that. But I sounded well enough. My aunt from North Carolina sent me huge amounts of sheet music that I could draw from. I was working with guys in their sixties, and they were astounded because I knew all these sounds. That’s how I got so much work, or enough to start buying my clothes instead of relying on my Mom and Pop to do it.”

“Pittsburgh trained me to work in every configuration. It was a tough town, a critical place. If you didn’t know what you were doing, you were going to be turned down there. We studied Bach and Tatum, Beethoven and Basie; there was no separation. I played with a lot of singers. I played with Eddie Jefferson when he was a tap dancer. I did a lot of big band work with Will Hitchcock, Joe Westray and Jerry Elliott, all good leaders. I worked duo jobs in Uniontown with saxophonist Carl Otter. Later, I worked with the Caldwells, a song-and-dance team who held the instruments, didn’t play them, so you had to be the bassist, the guitarist, the whole nine yards. This training creates the whole musician.”

Jamal devoured music. He collected 78s by Jimmie Lunceford and Count Basie, by Pittsburgher Erroll Garner with Boyd Raeburn and Georgie Auld, and early bebop anthems like “Salt Peanuts.” He heard the Fritz Reiner-conducted Pittsburgh Symphony at school assemblies, caught Basie and Gillespie at the Pittsburgh Savoy Ballroom, and attended concerts by Ellington and Cootie Williams at the Stanley Theater, the latter show featuring a 20-year-old Bud Powell. Later in the ’40s, Jamal—an avid student of the trio approaches of Tatum, Teddy Wilson, Nat Cole and Garner—would begin to incorporate Powell’s progressive harmonic conception into his vocabulary, applying his investigations at jam sessions with Pittsburgh’s finest at the union hall.

At one such session, St. Louis-based bandleader George Hudson, who had employed Clark Terry and Ernie Wilkins, heard Jamal and recruited him for a summer-long engagement in Club Harlem, the major showroom in Atlantic City. Starting work at 8 p.m. and leaving when the sun came up, Jamal played for top-shelf singers like Billy Daniels and Johnny Hartman, TOBA veterans Butterbeans and Susie and a charismatic chorus line choreographed and directed by Ziggy Johnson.

Jamal had intended to study at a conservatory, but at summer’s end he rode north with Hudson for a stint at New York’s Apollo Theater. “I didn’t go to 52nd Street,” Jamal said, nodding at the window. “I was too busy playing from 9 a.m. to midnight. We were on the bill with The Ravens, who had the hottest act in the country with ‘Old Man River.’ Dinah Washington. Jimmy Smith, a xylophone player who tap-danced on the instrument. Billy Eckstine was checking me out from the wings. That was fun, because the big band was your cover. You don’t have the same responsibilities.”

Quartered behind the backstage door of the Apollo at the Braddock Hotel, Jamal met trumpeter Idris Suleiman, an early jazz convert to Islam, who approached the introverted youngster with what Jamal describes as “a philosophical presentation.” That encounter planted the seeds for Jamal’s eventual embrace of Islam. “It had everything to do with being all you can be,” he says. “There are people who don’t want to be all they can be, and when you want to be all you can be, they want to put blocks in the path. I know no other existence except my present existence. I’m very guarded about this, because I’ve been abused by ignorant people. The issue at hand is music. If a person wants to interview me about philosophy, that’s a different ballgame, because my philosophy certainly has influenced my music.”

* * *

By early 1949, Jamal, newly wed to a woman from Chicago (“I did everything young,” he comments), had settled in the Windy City. He got on the bad side of Harry Gray, the famously hardass president of the black musicians local, by working a one-nighter with guitarist Leo Blevins before receiving transfer from Pittsburgh, and subsequently struggled, Taking a $32-a-week job as a maintenance man for the department store Carson Pirie Scott. At a request of saxophonist Eddie Johnson, Gray finally relented. Jamal began to make his voice felt on gigs with tenorists Claude McLin and Von Freeman, and took a long-term weekend job with Israel Crosby and tenorist Johnny Thompson at Jack’s Back Door, a lively joint on 59th and State with a long bar and a stage at the end. He also played solo at the Palm Tavern, often joined by drum legend Ike Day “whenever he felt the urge to come by and sit in.”

“I first met Ahmad at the Club De Lisa, which had been burned out a couple of times and gotten down to nothing,” Freeman recalled in a WKCR interview. “I asked him if he’d make some gigs with me, and he said, ‘Yeah, but I’m not much of a band player; I’m a trio player.’ I said, ‘Man, the way you play, you’ll fit in with anybody.’ He was playing sort of like Erroll Garner then. He stayed with me about two years, and then told me that he was giving a two-week notice, until he gave me a two-week notice that he was going to form his own trio. Around that time, he started hanging out with Chris Anderson. After that, I noticed a big difference in his playing.”

Joined by fellow Pittsburghers Ray Crawford and Tommy Sewell, Jamal formed the Three Strings, a collective title emblematic of his equilateral triangle approach to the trio. In the fall of 1951, with bassist Eddie Calhoun on board, Jamal came to New York for a job as intermission pianist at the Embers, a boisterous supper club on East 54th Street. John Hammond attended, was impressed, and gave Jamal a recording date on OKeh. The sessions produced “Ahmad’s Blues” and arrangements of “Poinciana,” “Surrey With The Fringe On Top” and “Billy Boy,” the latter becoming a minor crossover hit. On the strength of these sides, which immediately caught the ear of Miles Davis—whose own Birth Of The Cool sessions had inspired Jamal—for the finesse and subtlety of their rhythmic momentum, Jamal began to find regular work on the supper club circuit, using a small 63rd Street room called the Kit-Kat Lounge as his Chicago base. He hired his former employer Israel Crosby, and in 1955 went in the studio with Crosby and Crawford to record Chamber Music Of The New Jazz.

“I did something with repertoire,” Jamal says. “I had that vast repertoire from my aunt. The strength of a musician, whether he’s Horowitz or Rudolf Serkin or Jamal or Oscar Peterson, is the repertoire. It’s remarkable what the American classicist/jazz musician has done. They’ve interpreted these songs beyond the wildest dreams of the author, be it Cole Porter or Gershwin. That’s what Charlie Parker did with ‘April in Paris.’ Most of Art Tatum’s body of work was standards, much to the delight of the composers economically! They made a fortune. George Gershwin’s estate didn’t need ‘But Not For Me,’ but they accepted it. Or ‘Poinciana.’”

In 1955, following what he describes as “a horrible experience” at the Embers, Jamal “got in my car with Israel Crosby and drove back to Chicago. When I got back to Chicago, I went to Miller Brown, who owned the Pershing Lounge, and said, ‘I want to become an artist-in-residence; I want a steady gig.’ That gave me time to get the people I wanted. Ray Crawford stayed in New York, and I decided to hire a drummer. It was almost impossible to get Vernell Fournier, because he was busy. But I waited for the right moment, and I finally hired Vernell.”

* * * *

“When the Judgment Day comes, I would hate to be some critics!” Fournier exclaimed during an interview on WKCR in 1991, reflecting on the disdain and condescension that the jazz press gave to Live At The Pershing. Indeed, many writers continue to be deaf to Jamal’s qualities, in pointed contrast to his immense popularity among the public and his fellow musicians.

“At the time I heard Ahmad,” says Keith Jarrett, referring to Live At The Pershing, “I thought, ‘This is swinging more than anything I’ve been listening to, but they’re doing less. What’s the secret here?’ With Ahmad, the intensity was in the spaces. The simplicity of their playing made the swing work the way it did.”

“Ahmad put together the best trio I ever heard!” said Marcus Roberts in a conversation several years ago. “He and Errol Garner exemplify a hard-swinging school of Pittsburgh piano playing that had a profound impact on me. Garner typically would use his left hand to emulate Freddie Greene’s guitar playing in the Count Basie band, while in the right hand he played what you might think of as saxophone or trumpet figures in a big band. Ahmad extended that and expanded the form.

“Most of what Miles Davis did in the ’50s came directly from Ahmad’s concept. On a straight-ahead AB tune like ‘Autumn Leaves,’ Ahmad would expand the A-section until he had nothing left to play, then he’d move to the bridge and use a totally different groove. That brings the whole tune to life from a different angle. He’s a brilliant bandleader who knows how to make the piano sound like an orchestra; he could play a single line in the highest register of the piano and make it ring. Israel Crosby played all kinds of hip stuff underneath, but Ahmad’s left hand was never in the way of Israel’s harmonic direction.”

“Ahmad used difficult dynamics, and so many of them,” Fournier said. Out of New Orleans, Fournier’s extrapolation of the vernacular Crescent City streetbeat known as “Two-Way-Pocky-Way” on “Poinciana” is one of the most emulated rhythmic signatures in jazz. “He could play one tune five or six ways. He might insert something from another tune into the tune you’re playing, and would want you to play the appropriate accent when he did it. You had to be conscious at all times that he was playing the piano.”

Jamal uses dynamics to denote a spontaneous inner narrative, and he developed techniques to spontaneously shape and arrange the flow. “Ahmad’s music has structure and form, but he directs inside the form with hand signals,” says Herlin Riley, Jamal’s drummer from 1982 to 1987. “One signal tells you if you’re playing the top of, say, the head section or A-section, he has another cue for the bridge, and another for the interlude. If he wants any of the cycles repeated, he’ll give the appropriate cue, and when it’s done he cues you to go to the next part. So it’s always organic and rich.”

From the beginning, Fournier noted, “Ahmad intermixed exotic feelings — rumbas and tangos — and made it sound like jazz,” Fournier continued.Indeed, Jamal’s complete command of rhythm is a major component of his mystique. “I’ve always said that if Ahmad Jamal’s time was the brakes on a car, you would never have an accident,” says Harold Mabern, who first heard Jamal at the Kit Kat Club in 1954, and religiously attended sessions at the Pershing. “He will play a run and stop on a dime. And he’s a master at playing without cliche in time signatures like 5/4 and 7/4.”

Fournier gave an example. “When Ahmad got the melody for ‘This Terrible Planet’ (Extensions, Argo, 1965), he laid down his melody line and the bass line for Jamil Nasser, and he and Jamil formulated the sound that Ahmad wanted,” he recalls. “I developed the drum pattern from inside the melody. It was in 6/8, but 1, 3 and 5 was on the bass drum, and 2, 4 and 6 was on the snare drum, so it was like a 4/4 fighting the 6/8, which seems almost impossible, but your right foot will always fall out on 1—so it starts the sequence over and over again. Once you get used to that, the rest is easy.”

“Most New Orleans drummers grew up within street band and parade band traditions, in which the bass drum is prevalent, and so we play the drumset from the bottom up,” notes Riley, a son of the Crescent City. “Ahmad is a very percussive player, and he loves to play vamps; he’ll stand up, watch you play, and clap his hands to get inside the groove. He introduces 3/8 and 5/8 and 7/8 rhythms inside the music, and you have to react and find your place inside of that.

“He understands musicians, and can hear their voice for what it is. Either he can work with it or he can’t. If he can, he’ll let you speak your musical voice as it may be. Now, sometimes he gives you subtle directions, and he’s always directing the volume and dynamics. But really, he’s just shaping whatever talent you have, and lets it grow and be better.”

Jamal himself is wary of focusing on the details of his art, preferring to accentuate the larger picture. “The little variety of time signatures that I do are absolutely natural,” he says. “I respect technique, but technique without the ability to tell a story is meaningless. Art Tatum and Phineas Newborn had incomparable technique. But they also told a story.”

* * * *

Within two years after Live From The Pershing broke, Jamal was commanding several thousand dollars a week. He purchased a 16-room, six-bath Hyde Park mansion that had once belonged to the nuclear physicist Harold Urey, and a four-story office building on South Michigan Avenue, creating his own posh, alcohol-free supper club, the Alhambra, on the ground floor. But he overextended, got divorced, lost the club, disbanded and moved to New York in 1962, taking an engagement at the Embers with bassist Wyatt Reuther and drummer Papa Jo Jones. He became artist-in-residence at the Village Gate on Bleecker Street, which like the Pershing had upper and lower levels and a bar area.

“When Ahmad got to New York, he really started opening up,” Mabern observes. In fact, it’s evident from a recording at San Francisco’s Blackhawk in 1961 that Jamal was already beginning to spread his wings. “Earlier, I never picked up a stick, except for ‘Poinciana,’” Fournier said. “But toward the end of the trio, Ahmad was getting more into the stick sound. He became more progressive on the piano, showing what he really could do.”

The Jamal who created such 1964–’71 albums as Naked City Theme, Extensions, At The Top: Poinciana Revisited, Tranquility, The Awakening and Manhattan Reflections had moved a distance from the elegant miniaturist of 1958–’61. Like a short story writer morphing into a novelist, Jamal’s improvisational flights took on the discursive, kaleidoscopic character that remains his trademark. He denies that this evolution reflected the intense New York quotidian, saying only, “I was in New York, but not of it.” To this he adds, “and I was in Chicago, but not of it.”

“Does that mean you’re in Pittsburgh?” I ask.

“I am in Pittsburgh, but I am also in where I live now,” Jamal responds. “Since I moved to upstate New York, I am in tune with my surroundings. By the grace of the Creator, I’ve been backing off, being very selective and taking the time that’s been granted me to sit down and get away from the smell of the greasepaint and the roar of the crowd. I go to my little place in the country, hopefully I’m not watching TV, and sit down and do what I enjoy most — writing and practicing the things I write.

“Still, the fact is that I was shaped, first of all, by my hometown. I come from the land of giants, and there you have to practice restraint. There’s always a faster gun than yours. I still practice restraint. But sometimes I play, too!

“Some things I write require a lot of skill, so I have to learn to play all my compositions, and I practice every day. But I’m not interested in quantity. I’m interested in quality. I’ve never had the discipline to practice 6, 7 or 12 hours a day. But I live music, and now I’m interested in exploring the keyboard more. Steinway used to send me pianos to keep in the room so I wouldn’t have to run out or wait for the club to open. Now I’ve decided to take an instrument around with me again. I’m not ever going to practice without joy. And I don’t ever want to take this music for granted. If you do, you’re finished.

“I practice for many reasons. One, I want to do it. Two, I want to always develop my craft. Three, I don’t ever want to take this music for granted. If you do, you’re finished. Musicians have to stay on their game. And I have to devote a certain amount of time to music. Many things can take you away from the discipline of practice. You have to be very careful of losing those good disciplines.”

Jamal points to the score of “Le Tombeau de Couperin.” “Ravel wrote that about his comrades who died during the war.” The tapered finger moves to the “Lush Life” folio. “Okay? A reflection of Billy Strayhorn’s life. ‘Take The A Train.’ That’s what we are. We write according to our lives. The way I write and perform is a part of extended living. That’s what’s changed it. The more in-depth, the more in-depth.”

For the 91st birth anniversary of the master tenor saxophonist Von Freeman, one of the most singular individual stylists ever to play his instrument, here’s the proceedings of a Musician’s show that he did with me on WKCR in 1987. It was the first of what I believe were 4, maybe 5 encounters that I was fortunate to be able to put together with the maestro during my years at the station. Three years ago, when his NEA Jazz Mastership was announced, I posted this 1994 interview. A transcript of a 1991 encounter with Mr. Freeman and John Young has been posted on the Jazz Journalist Association website for more than a decade; maybe next year, I’ll post it here.

How did you get into music?

Well, actually I began very, very early by taking my father’s Victrola . . . See, that’s a little bit before your time. A Victrola had an arm shaped like a saxophone that the needle was in that played the record. And I had been banging on the piano. They had bought me a piano when I was about one year old, and I’d been banging on that thing all my life. So finally, I took up the saxophone at about five, primarily through my dad’s Victrola. I actually took it off, man, and carved holes in it and made a mouthpiece. He thought I was crazy, of course, because that’s what he played his sounds — his Wallers and his Rudy Vallees and his Louis Armstrongs (those were three of his favorites), his Earl Hines and things — on. He said, “Boy, you’re not serious, are you?” Of course, I was running around; I was making noise with this thing. So he bought me a C-melody saxophone, and I’ll never forget it.

How old were you?

Oh, I was about 7 at that time. The guy sold it to us for a tenor. Well, it is a tenor, but it’s a C-tenor, a tenor in C. And of course, I was running around playing that thing. Gradually I grew and I grew and I grew and I grew. Finally I ended up in DuSable High School, where I was tutored by Captain Walter Dyett, like so many Chicagoans were.

Were you in the first class of DuSable High School?

Well, see, DuSable actually began in Wendell Phillips. That was another high school in Chicago, and Captain Walter Dyett was teaching there, where he taught such guys as Nat “King” Cole and that line, who were a little bit older than I was.

Ray Nance, Milt Hinton, a whole line of people.

Oh, there’s quite a few.

The band program at Wendell Phillips was initially established by Major Clark Smith.VF:Right.Q:By the way, did you ever come in contact with him?

No, I never did, but I heard a lot of things about him! I heard Captain Walter Dyett mention Major Smith, but I was so young at the time. And I was so taken up with him, because he was such a great, great disciplinarian, as I would call him — besides being a great teacher and whatnot. He put that discipline in you from the time you walked into his class. And it has been with me the rest of my life, actually.

You were in high school with a lot of people who eventually became eminent musicians. Let’s mention a few of them.

Well, of course, everyone knows about the late and great Gene Ammons, and of course Bennie Green was there, Johnny Griffin . . .

Griff was after you, though.

Well, I’m just naming them, because there were so many of them . . .

But in your class were Dorothy Donegan . . .

Dorothy Donegan, right.

. . John Young, Bennie Green and people like that.

Augustus Chapell, who was a great trombonist. Listen, there’s so many guys that we could spend the program just naming them.

Tell me about how Captain Dyett organized the music situation at DuSable. He had several different types of bands for different functions, did he not?

Yes, he did. Well, it was standard during that era, actually. He had a concert band, he had a swing band, and he had a marching band, and then he had a choral band. Like, you played all types of music there, and he made you play every one of them well. No scamming. And he had his ruler, he had his baton, and he didn’t mind bopping you. See, that was his thing to get you interested. Like, you could fool around until you came to the music class, which usually would be where you would fool around — but not with him.

Then they had a chorus teacher there who taught voice, and her name was Mrs. Mildred Bryant-Jones. She was very important. I haven’t heard her name mentioned too much, but I studied with her also. She taught harmony and vocalizing.

Actually, I never saw Captain Walter Dyett play an instrument, but I heard he was a very good violinist and pianist. I never saw him play saxophone or trumpet or anything, but he knew the fingering to everything, and he saw that you played it correctly — which of course I thought was very, very great. And he stood for no tomfoolery.

He provided a situation that was sort of a bridge from school into the professional world, didn’t he?

Well, that was later on. In fact, that was just about when I was about to graduate in ’41. He formed what he called the DuSableites. It was a jazz band. Originally Gene Ammons and quite a few of us were in that band. He had a great trumpet player who was living at that time named Jesse Miller, and he was one of the leading trumpet players in Chicago at that time. But Dorothy Donegan was in that band, playing the piano. A very good band. And we would play little jobs. He made us all join the union . . . That band lasted until ’46. I had come out of the service. I was in that band when it folded, actually, and that’s when I began playing professionally in, shall we say, sextets and quintets and things like that.

What kind of repertoire would those bands have?

Oh, it was standard. It was waltzes and jazz. He would buy the charts from the big bands, all the standard big band charts.

Were you playing for dancers?

Dancers and celebrations and bar mitzvahs, the standard thing.

While you were in high school did you go out to hear music? Did you hear Earl Hines?

Yes. Well, you see, Earl Hines, I’m privileged to say, was a personal friend of my dad’s. There’s three I remember that came by the house, Earl Hines, Louis Armstrong and Fats Waller.

Was your dad a musician?

No, but he loved musicians. My father was a policeman. But he loved music and he loved musicians. And he would always have on the radio playing, and he played the whole gamut. That’s another thing that helped me. He liked waltzes. He liked Guy Lombardo’s orchestra. And he always had the jazz orchestras on. At that time, of course, the jazz orchestras did a whole lot of remotes, you know, from different clubs. Like, Earl Hines was coming from the Grand Terrace, and Earl was coming on sometimes nightly. Of course, he had a great band. And Earl would come by the house maybe once a year or so, and I’d see him talking with my dad, and I formed a friendship with him. Great man. And Fats Waller even played my piano!

Amazing you even touched it.

Oh, yes, he was a beautiful man. And of course, Louis Armstrong was . . . I don’t know, he was just like you’ve always seen him — he was Pops. Those three men I just fell in love with.

He was Pops off the stage, huh?

Well, he was Pops on and off. Everybody was Pops. He called me Pops. I think I was about five or six years old. “Hi, Pops!”

Who were some of the other bands around Chicago that you heard? Or some of the other players, for that matter?

Well, listen, there were so many great bands. In fact, when Earl Hines left the Grand Terrace, King Kolax replaced that band. And let me tell you something I think is interesting. When I was in the last year, I think I was in the senior year at DuSable, he approached both Gene Ammons and I, and tried to get us to go on the road with him. Jug went, and of course Jug never looked back. I stayed in school. But Jug went with that band until it folded, and then he joined Billy Eckstine — and of course, the rest is history with Jug. He cut “Red Top” in 1947, and he never looked back.Q:I’ve heard mention from you of a tenor player named Johnny Thompson who you said would have been one of the best had he lived.VF:Oh, listen, man, he was a beautiful cat, and he played almost identically to Prez without copying Prez. He held his horn like Prez, his head like Prez, and very soft-spoken, and then he was tall like Prez. Johnny came to an unseemly end, unfortunately.

Well, Prez had that effect on a lot of people, I would imagine. You, too, I think.

Oh, I was running around there trying to play everything that Prez played. See, Prez was like this. Everybody loved Coleman Hawkins, but he was so advanced harmonically you could hardly sing anything he played. But Prez had that thing where we could sing all of his solos. We’d go to the Regal Theatre and stand out front and (now I know) heckle Prez. Because he’d come out and play, we’d be singing his solos — and Prez never played the same solo, you know! He’d look at us as if to say “I wish those dummies would hush.” We’d be down in the front row, “Hold that horn up there, Prez! Do it, baby!” So all those little nuts were running around trying to hold those tenors at that 45-degree thing like him. Needless to say, Prez must have had the strongest wrists in the world, because today I can’t hold a tenor up in the air, not longer than for four or five seconds. And he had that horn, boy, up in the air, and could execute with it like that. Simply amazing.

Prez with the Basie band, huh?

Oh, yes.

Where did they play in Chicago?

Well, the Regal Theatre mostly. Most of the big bands played the Regal. Then they had another place called the White City out at South 63rd Street, and a lot of bands played there, too.

Let’s review the geography of the South Side venues, so we can establish where people were playing, and in what types of situations.

Well, the Regal Theatre was, of course, at 47th and South Parkway, which is now King Drive. Now, the Grand Terrace was down at 39th Street, and Club DeLisa was over at 55th Street. But the center where all the big bands really came was at the Regal Theatre. See, Earl Hines was at the old Grand Terrace, and Red Saunders, who had a great local band, was at the Club De Lisa.

They had the Monday morning jam session there, too.

Oh yes. It was famous throughout the world.

The famous show band there . . .

Yeah, Red Saunders. He was known as the World’s Greatest Show Drummer. That’s the way that they billed him.

How did you first come into contact with Coleman Hawkins?

Well, Coleman Hawkins used to play at a club called the Golden Lily, right down at 55th Street, next door to the El. Of course, we would go down there until the police ran us away from in front of the place, and listen to Hawk blowing. You could hear that big, beautiful sound; you could hear him for half-a-block. And he played at another club called the Rhumboogie quite frequently. I got to talk with him a few times, and he was always . . . He was just like Prez. He was gracious and beautiful.

Well, you’ve been quoted as saying that your style is really a composite of Hawk and Prez, with your own embouchure.

Yes. Well, at that time I didn’t really understand, but they used two entirely different embouchures — for people who are into embouchures, you know. I was fooling around trying to play like both of them, and I was using the same embouchure. Hawk had more of a classical embouchure, and Prez had more of what I would call a jazz embouchure, an embouchure that enabled him to get his feeling out the way he wanted it. I wouldn’t say one is better than the other; it’s just that they both had two different embouchures. Of course, when I came along, I didn’t really know what I was doing; I was just trying to sound like both of them at the same time.

But of course, I liked all of the saxophone players. I had a few local saxophone players I was crazy about. There was a fellow named Roy Grant, one named Dave Young, another named James Scales.

James Scales played with Sun Ra at one point.

Yes. Yes, he did! Very good. And he’s still around. He’s a very good saxophonist. He never left Chicago. None of those three did.

Well, actually, it was at different clubs around Chicago. The Beehive was one, and he worked numerous little clubs.Q:Do you remember the first time?VF:Well, at the Pershing. That was back in the ’40s.

What were the circumstances? You were in the house band.

Yes. Now, a lot of people don’t know whether it was Claude McLin on “These Foolish Things” or myself. There were several tenor players that were on these different jobs, and they were mostly using my rhythm section. And I really can’t tell whether it’s myself either, because almost all of us were trying to play like Lester Young at the time, because that was the thing to do if you were able at all. You were either playing like Coleman Hawkins or Lester Young, so you took your pick. And I was trying to play like a combination, of course, of both of them. That made me a sound a little bit different. But we were all in either a Hawk bag or a Prez bag, or between the two somewhere. Of course, I admired both of them equally. And along with Don Byas and Ben Webster . . . Well, you name all the great saxophone players, I loved them all.

Well, obviously, you had listened to a lot of records, and had heard everybody.

Oh, yes. I still do.

You and your two brothers were the house band at the Pershing for several years. How did that happen?

Just a blessing. Just a blessing. There was a great producer around town, or promoter you could call him, named McKie Fitzhugh, and he took a liking to us. He thought we had a nice sound and were capable of playing with these men. We had the great Chris Anderson at the piano, who could play anything, anywhere, and my brother Bruz was an up-and-coming new drummer with plenty of fire, and either Leroy Jackson or another fellow named Alfred White on bass. We were using several men then who were top local men around Chicago, and they were all young and able to play. Bird played very fast, and boy, you had to have men that were capable of keeping up with him. See, he would play these records at one tempo, but when he played in person, oh, you know, Bird could articulate those tunes. Diz and Fat Girl [Fats Navarro] and Howard McGhee and all the cats, they played very, very fast, and you had to keep up with them, see.

So it was more a blessing than anything else. There were many musicians around Chicago that could have done the same thing, but we were called. And we answered the call.

You were in a Navy band for four years before that, stationed in Hawaii.

Oh, yes.

Let’s talk about those very important years.

Oh, that was a blessing. That’s where I got my first real training. See, I was with the Horace Henderson band just for a while. Of course, when I went in that band, I thought I was a hot shot, you know.

That was your first professional job?

Yes. And when I went in that big band, boy, I found out just how much I didn’t know. And he had all of the star cats in the band, and of course . . .

Who was in the band?

Well, Johnny Boyd was seated right next to me, and a fellow named Lipman(?) was playing trumpet, Gail Brockman was in that band . . . Listen, some of the guys I can’t name now, because this was back in ’39, and I was like about 16 or something. So I was the new hot-shot in town in this big band. I could read. That’s about it! And they took me in hand . . . Because I was very humble. See, during that era, the young guys looked up to the older guys, and well that they should have. A lot of the older guys would pass a lot of their information and knowledge down to you if you were humble. And of course, I was. Still try to be.

Were you playing exclusively tenor sax?

Well, during school we all played a zillion instruments, probably most of them badly. But I was playing trumpet and trombone, drums, bass. If there was anything that you could get your hands on, Walter Dyett wanted you to learn it. But I ended up mostly playing tenor.

After working with Horace Henderson, you enlisted in the Navy and joined the band.

Oh, that’s where I really learned, boy. That’s where I ran into all the great musicians from around the world. Willie Smith and Clark Terry . . .

You were in a band with them?

Oh, no-no. See, Great Lakes had three bands, an A band, a B band, and a C band. I was in the C band. But all the big stars were mostly in the A band, and then the lesser players were in the C band.

Great Lakes is a Naval base north of Chicago near Lake Michigan, right?

Yes. So Clark Terry and I used to jam, and that cat, man, he could blow the horn to death, even back at that time, and this is like 1941 or ’42. Then of course, the bands were all split up, and I was shipped overseas. Now, a lot of people say that I have an original sound, but that’s not true at all. Where I got that sound and that conception of playing was from a saxophone player named Dave Young.

From Chicago.

Yes. Dave Young used to play with Roy Eldridge and quite a few other guys. To me he was one of the greatest saxophone players I’d ever heard, bar none. He took me under his wing when I was in the Navy, when we were stationed in Hawaii. I said, “Man, how are you getting that tone you get? You have so much projection.” And I started using his mouthpiece and his reeds, and he corrected my embouchure a lot. In fact, I would say that most of my formative training on a saxophone was from Dave Young. I had been trying my best to play like Prez and Hawk and whatnot, and his style was what I’d say I was looking for between those two great saxophone players, Prez and Hawk, but it was his own thing and his own way of executing it, and I tried to copy it. I don’t think Dave Young plays any more. I think he’s still around Chicago, but I don’t think he plays any more. He was a few years older than I am. So the sound that I am getting I think is primarily the sound that he was getting. Maybe I’ve refined it a little bit more in all these years I’ve been doing it. But the idea for getting that sound came from Dave Young. Great saxophone player.

And he was with the band you were in when you were stationed in Hawaii called the Navy Hellcats?

Right.

You were in the Navy until 1946?

Yes, from ’42 until ’46.

What type of engagements did you play in the Navy? For the enlisted men, social functions and so forth?

Yes, and the officers. And we traveled all over the island. I was about the only one who had never been in a big band, other than Horace Henderson. All these men came out of Lucky Millinder, Cab Calloway’s band, Count Basie’s band and what have you. That’s where I learned how to arrange; they taught me a lot about arranging. Because I used to take my little arrangements in, and everybody said, “Man, you got to get hip, baby. You got to tighten up some.” And they would show me different things.

The next music we’ll hear is by Gene Ammons, who was pretty much the main man in Chicago during this time.

Oh, Gene was echelons above the rest of us. He had already established himself, he had cut hit records, and of course, the rest of us were more or less using him as a guide post. At the time, Gene was working a lot with Tom Archia. Tom was like a vagabond type of musician; he was in and out of everything. He was a great player. And Gene mostly played with his bands.

What we’re going to hear now is Jug with drummer Ike Day. What did he sound like, as best as you can describe it?

Well, he had a very smooth sound; he was very, very smooth. He was ambidextrous, so he could do like four rhythms at once, and make it fit jazz — and a great soloist. But he was also a great listener. Like, he and I used to go out and jam, drums and saxophone, you know, and you didn’t miss anything. His time was very, very even, but he could do anything he wanted to do. Truly, I think, one of the few geniuses I’ve really heard.

Who were his influences? We were mentioning Baby Dodds before . . .

Oh, I would imagine those type. Sid Catlett and those type of fellows.

Was he originally from the Chicago area? Is that where he was raised?

You know, when I first saw him, he was around Chicago. I really never asked him where he was from. I know he loved the great Max Roach, he loved Klook [Kenny Clarke] — he loved all the fellows from New York, of course. And I would like to think that they dug his playing.

We’ll hear a Gene Ammons date with Christine Chapman on piano, Leo Blevins on guitar, Lowell Pointer on bass, and Ike Day on drums.

I’d like to go a little more into what the musical life in Chicago was like in the late ’40s and early ’50s. There was so much happening.

Man, it was one of the greatest eras of my life. You could go from one club to another, and you could catch Dexter in one club, you could catch the great Sonny Rollins in another club, you could catch Coltrane down the street, you could catch the great Johnny Griffin down the street, you could catch [Eddie] Lockjaw [Davis] when he’d come in town — all these cats were some of the greatest saxophone players ever heard of. Lucky Thompson, Don Byas.

Ben Webster, man, I used to hang out with! It was beautiful. I used to ask him, I said, “Mister Ben, how do you get that great sound, baby? Tell me, please!” He said, “Listen. Just blow with a stiff reed.” So I was running around buying fives, man! I wasn’t getting anything but air, you know, but it was cool, because Ben said, “Blow a five,” you know.

But all of the great saxophone players . . . Wardell Gray would come to the Beehive. If you name a great saxophone player or a trumpeter or pianist (well, a great musician), they were around 63rd Street during the late ’40s and early ’50s. And you could go from the Cotton Club, which was a great club there, the Crown Propeller, Harry’s — there were so many clubs there.

And all the clubs would be full. The community was into it.

Oh, listen! And people were patting their feet and their booties were shaking and clapping hands. When you walk into a club and see that, man, you know people are into that thing, see, because they can’t be still. You had drummers at that time, man, like Blakey and the cats would come in town; these cats were rhythm masters. When they played a solo on the drums even, you could keep time with it. Max would come in there and you could hear the song; you know, when Roach would play, you could still hear the song.

So it was just a singing, swinging era. And of course, I was running around there trying to get all of it I could get, get it together and try to piece it together. The cats who actually lived in Chicago didn’t have too much of a name at the time, but we were mixing with all of the stars from around the world. And it helped us. See, it helped us greatly. At that time you could do a lot of jamming, unlike today. Of course, it just helped you to get up and rub shoulders. You could talk with the cats. It was beautiful.

Were you able to make a living playing just jazz, or did you also deal with blues and other types of music?

Well, see, at that time, in my opinion, it was almost all the same. Like, they had this rhythm-and-blues, but it was very similar to Jazz. Now, you had the down-and-out blues cats, you know, who were playing just strictly three changes. But you had a bunch of the rhythm-and-blues cats who were actually playing jazz. And it swung. Maybe it was a shuffle beat, but you’ve got to remember, some of Duke’s greatest tunes, if you listen, the drummer is playing the backbeat or the shuffle, or stop time, or something — and that’s in some of his greatest tunes. Like, if you hear Buhaina play a shuffle or something, man, it swings, because he’s hip and he knows how to do it so it’s still jazz. It’s just a matter of having that taste and knowing where to put those beats. See? Because jazz musicians are always very hip, always very hip dudes, because they spend their life learning these things and practicing these things, see. And a lot of the jazz cats are in it to further the music. Of course, they want money, they need money like everybody else. But their primary thing is to further this music — I like to think.

Von Freeman is certainly one who has contributed to the cause.

Oh, well, don’t look at it like that, Ted! No, it’s just that if I’m not famous and make a lot of money, I can blame nobody but Von Freeman. Because I stayed right there in Chicago, see. And no one is going to stay in Chicago or anywhere else, unless it’s New York, and get a big name, because there are not recording outlets. Well, I know all of this. And I’m not sacrificing anything! Hey, I’m happy where I am. It’s just happenstance I’m in Chicago.

Well, I wasn’t thinking of it like that; I was thinking of it in terms of your advancing the cause. But you’re painting a picture of Chicago that was veritable beehive of musical activity.

Oh, it was. Everybody was coming there. And the whole town was swinging. Like I said, you could go from club to club and find a star — and he might not even be working; he just might be in there jamming. You know, that type of thing. Because the music had such a beautiful aura to it at that time. I like to think that it’s coming right back to that now. I can see it happening again.

In Chicago now.

Oh, yes, Chicago is really opening up.

It was pretty dry in Chicago for a while.

Oh, for a while we went through a dry spell that was mean. At one time I was on 75th Street, and I was the only guy playing Jazz on 75th Street, as famous as that street is! And I was jamming mostly, and all the cats would come by and help me by jamming. Like my brother George, with Gene Ammons, and Gene Ammons would come by when they were here — “Jug is down the street, man, with Vonski!” They’d all run down there, you know, and my brother George would bring Jug along with him. And of course, Jug had this big name and this big, beautiful sound, and he would take out his horn . . . In fact, he would blow my horn, and just knock everybody out. I loved Jug.

During the break we had a call from somebody who noted that we had been playing Sonny Stitt before, and noted Sonny Stitt’s propensity to try to take over jam sessions, cutting contests, so to speak, which certainly is popularly identified with Chicago tenor playing. He wondered if you had anything to say about that renowned institution in Chicago life, the cutting contest.

Well, now, Sonny Stitt was one of my running partners, boy. But nobody,nobodyfooled with Sonny Stitt when it came to jamming. Sonny was extra mean. Because Sonny could play so fast, see. And Sonny would bring both his horns. See, we would all be jamming, and of course, Sonny would tell his story on, say, alto. It’s very hard to even follow that. And then after everyone had got through struggling behind Sonny, then Sonny would pick up the tenor. So the best thing to do with Sonny Stitt was make friends with him. [Laughs] That was the best thing. Because I loved him.

See, I have a lot of Sonny Stitt in my style. I used to kid him all the time. I used to tell him that he was one of the world’s greatest saxophone players. He’d say, “Aw, shucks, do you really mean it?” But I really meant it. Sonny used to come to Chicago . . .

In fact, you know, when you think about Chicago (this is my opinion, of course), and you think of the saxophone players . . . Man, I don’t know. But I can run down a list and the styles . . . Now, for instance, you had that style of Willis Jackson, Arnett Cobb, Illinois Jacquet, and you had Fathead Newman, and of course, Ike Quebec (everybody called him Q), and Joe Thomas, Dick Wilson, and of course, the cat who is still the man, Stanley Turrentine. Now, that’s just one style of tenor that’s hard to master, because all these cats played hard, man, and they hit a lot of high notes, and they played a very exciting instrument.

Then, on the other hand, you had cats around Chicago like Stan Getz, Zoot Sims, Allen Eager would come through. Now they were playing . . .

That serious Prez bag.

Yeah, that serious Prez bag, which is that softer thing. Then you had cats like Don Byas, Lucky Thompson, and Johnny Griffin, Gene Ammons bootin’ — that other type of tenor. And of course, don’t leave out Jaws, and the fellow that you just played used to hang around Chicago and wiped everybody out, Dexter Gordon, Long-Long Tall — he and Wardell.

Now, there’s three definite different schools of tenor, and when you pick up a tenor, unlike most instruments, you’ve got to master all three of those styles. And I can tell when a cat has missed one of them. I don’t care which one of these styles it is. I can tell when I listen to him a set which one of these styles he missed.

I think that’s what made Coltrane so great, was Coltrane was a composition of all these styles. Because see, when Trane first came to town, man, he was playing alto with Earl Bostic, and Earl Bostic, we considered not rock-and- roll, but rhythm-and-blues. Of course, Earl started on high-F and went beyond; that was his style; and then he growled on the tenor. And Trane was there with him. So Trane was getting all this stuff together.

And of course, nowadays . . . That’s one reason why I admire Chico Freeman so much. Because he has, and he’s trying to get Sonny Rollins and Trane, and then all the cats I named into his bag. Which is what you’ve got to do today. See, you can’t just have one style and say, “Hey, I’m going with that.” Like all these cats started with Trane in his later years, which is a beautiful thing, but they don’t know what Trane came through. And of course, it’s hard for them to get that feeling, because he had the whole thing. And nowadays, you have to try to get all that there, because all of these saxophone players are great saxophone players. Some of them are still living, see.

So to me, that’s what makes the tenor the mystery instrument. And I remember, like, in the ’50s, we were all trying to get Gene Ammons, because he was cutting all the hit records and he had this big beautiful sound. Then Johnny Griffin came along with all that speed; he’s another genius. So then everybody shifted over to his bag. Sonny Rollins used to come to town, into the DJ Lounge, and of course, Sonny had it all, everybody was trying to get between Johnny Griffin and Sonny Rollins — everybody was trying to get that thing together. Then before they could get that thing together, here comes Trane. And of course, Trane just kind of drowned everybody, because he had all of that stuff together, and he left a lot of wounded soldiers along the way. See, cats are still trying to recover from that Trane explosion. And of course, they shouldn’t look at it that way. I think they should look at it that Trane assimilated everything; they’ve got to assimilate everything up to Trane and then move on.

Of course, that’s hard. You see, it’s pretty easy, maybe much easier to take one of those styles and then go for it. But the tenor is such that when you play now, you’ve got to be exciting, you’ve got to be melodic, you’ve got to be soulful, cheerful, you know, and all these other adjectives. So the tenor, when they see you with a tenor in your hand, you’ve got all these styles. Like Willis Jackson again. Man, I went on a trip with that cat. Man, if you are not together, he’ll blow you off that bandstand, because he’s got such a big, robust style, and he can play forty different ways. And he’s just one of the cats.

So you have to try to get your discography together, and you have to listen. And of course, a lot of these fellows are gone, but their records are still here. So I challenge every saxophone player that . . . And I’m just speaking now of tenor players. Now, don’t let me get into the alto players.

Oh, you could get into a couple of altos.

Well, I really don’t like to get into them, because you know, Bird and Johnny Hodges and all those cats, man . . . There’s a bunch of them. If you get into them, a saxophone player says, “Aw shucks, I’ll play the piano, ha- ha, or the trumpet.”

Well, then you’ve got to deal with some other people if you do that.

Yes. See, there’s so many ways to deal with things. But I think everybody is so blessed nowadays that they have the records here, and they can listen and listen, and try to get these different styles into their head. And of course, they don’t have to worry about sounding like anybody else, because once you get all that stuff together, you’re going to sound like yourself — unless you just go and play somebody else just note for note and try to get their tone. And I don’t see much sense in that! I think eventually you’re going to find your own thing. I think that’s what it’s all about.

We’ll start the next set with a piece by bassist Wilbur Ware, a bassist who has to be classed in a niche by himself. And Von knew Wilbur Ware quite well.

Oh, he used to work with me. Well, Wilbur Ware, when I first met him, he was a street-corner musician. Man, he was playing a tub with a 2-by-4 and a string on it when I first heard him. I said, “Man, do you have a real bass?” He said, “Well . . . ” I said, “Do you play acoustic bass?” He said, “I’ve got a baby bass.” I didn’t know what he meant, but he had a bass that was about a quarter-size bass. It was a real bass, but it was very small. I said, “Well, man, come and work with me.” He said, “Well, where?” I said, “Well, I’m playing a duo on the weekends. I’ve got two gigs, man.” I felt great to have these two gigs. And we were playing in a place up on the second floor in the Elks Hall. He said, “With two pieces?” I said, “Yeah, man, that’s all the man can afford to hire.”

So this cat made this gig with me, man, and honest to goodness, just bass and tenor. And this cat was playing . . . See, Wilbur’s conception was that he played the bass like maybe he’s playing two basses, like he’s walking and he’s playing another line. That’s just his natural style! And the cat at the time didn’t read, he didn’t know F from G, he didn’t know nothin’. But he had this great ear. You know, formally! But he was great, man.

So he said, “Well, listen, man, how many more gigs you got?” I said, “Well, I’ve got a few more little old gigs” — because then if you had ten gigs a year, you were lucky. So I was telling him, “Man, I got a couple of other little gigs, but you’ve got to read some arrangements.” He said, “Do you think I could learn to read?” I said, “Sure, man!” So he started coming by my house, and I started showing him a few things about counting. And the cat picked it up so quickly! He was just a natural genius on bass. And he always played down in the bass fiddle. And I used to try to get him to smile, and I’d say, “Wilbur, smile some, baby. Come on, get with me!” Because I was I was doing the five-step and everything else, trying to feed this family and all. So he got to the point where he could just read anything you put in front of him. And I said, “Man, how in the world can you learn to read that quickly?” He said, “You know, I feel like I always could read.” But that’s when I found out that some people don’t really need to read, man. It’s great if you can. But that man could hear anything you . . . He was a natural musician.

As he proved with Monk when he went out with him.

Yeah, really. And a great cat. And he used to be so cool and so suave, until one night I heard him play the drums. He got on a cat’s drums, and he goes crazy. So I found out, now, that’s where his personality was. Because he kept great time on the drums. But he went nuts. He would start giggling and laughing! I said, “Man, get up off those drums and get back on the bass” — and he was very cool again! Wilbur Ware, man, he’s a great cat.

Do you think different instruments have different personalities?

Oh yeah. Because I’m pretty cool playing the tenor, but man, get me on a piano and I start jumping up and down. I think that’s where my natural personality is! I play something like . . . I’ll tell you who my style is like. It’s something like a mixture between Sun Ra and Cecil Taylor. Really, just naturally.

Oh, man, he was with me a long time. He was the cat who hipped me to harmony, man. I thought I knew a little something about harmony, boy, but when I went around to Chris Anderson, that little genius was in this . . . Now, you’ve got to understand, this was back in the ’40s. Man, that cat could play some things; he and Bill Lee, a bass player that’s around. Man, those cats had such an advanced knowledge of harmony! Chris used to take me aside, and I’d sit there and listen to him just play, and the different variations that he could and would play, man — I’m still astounded. And I heard that record; he’s still doing it.

In the segment we’ll hear the “avants,” as Von said, another generation of musicians who were taking the music in a different direction. And one of the key figures in that is Sun Ra.

Oh, man, yeah!

Tell us about your experiences with Sun Ra.

See, Sun Ra and I were more than just musicians. We were like friends. I have a few stories I could tell about Sun Ra, but really not on air at this time. But Sun Ra was and is an amazing man.

But before I get into Sun Ra, I would like to mention Frank Strozier. I met Frank when he first came to town with Harold Mabern and George Coleman, and of course, these cats are three of the greatest ever. You know, I didn’t mention alto players, but Frank Strozier and cats like McPherson, and Lou Donaldson (who is appearing at the Apartment in Chicago this weekend while I’m playing here — because you know, I love Lou), and of course, the great Phil Woods, and Jackie McLean! See, when you get into the alto players, then man, we could talk all day long about them, too — because that’s another bag.

See, I have often said that there are alto players, and there are tenor players, and there are a few baritone players — and a few soprano players. I think that Sonny Stitt was a rarity, he and Ira Sullivan, that they doubled. But I think more saxophone players either hear B-flat or E-flat, or hear that high horn, which is soprano, or hear that low horn, which is baritone. Of course, we could get into the baritone players, too! We could be here until tomorrow!

But I love all of them, because I know the problems that face a saxophone player.

But speaking about Sun Ra, Sun Ra was a man who I think had envisioned a lot of things that are happening today, with the synthesizers and whatnot. Sun Ra was really actually doing that back in the ’40s. And he was living a dual life, man!

How so?

Well, this cat was writing a straight show at a big club called the Club De Lisa; I mean,dah-da-duh-da-da-data–boom. And then he was writing all these other things for his band. His music encompassed so many different varieties of things, until I think Sun Ra is finally getting his due. Whether you like him or whether you don’t like him, you have to understand that the man was a seer of the future. Because people are doing now what Sun Ra did 40 years ago. And John Gilmore was playing outside way back then. I mean, what they call outside now. John was playing like that then, he and Pat Patrick both.

John Gilmore has said he met Sun Ra in 1953; I know you were working with people even before that. Was he working at all?

Well, he was doing his thing . . .

Apart from the De Lisa gig?

Yeah. And he was playing then . . . He was so strong . . . He’d play a dance. If three people came, he’d thank them and keep right on writing and keep right on playing. The man is a strong man, physically and mentally and spiritually and psychologically. That’s why he was able to last. Because people used to say, “Aw, he’s spacey, he’s out there” — but now everybody’s doing it.

What did you think of the out-there music then?

Oh, I dug it. I love it. I love it right today. Listen, let’s get out! Let’s get out there!

But a lot of the cats you were coming up with playing bebop didn’t really share that feeling about it.

Well, I think what a lot of the people thought, and the musicians, because I talked with a lot of them, I came up with them . . . Well, nobody wants to hear anybody go out if he hasn’t learned in. You see, if you haven’t learned your basics and you didn’t come up through all these saxophone players and trumpet players and piano players and drummers, the people who were fundamental in creating this music, if you didn’t pay your dues in that, well, nobody wants to hear you play outside, because you don’t know in.

And I have often said that you should learn in. Not that youhaveto learn in, because some people are just geniuses. But I would say the majority of us have to learn in. Now, if a person comes along who is playing what he should play and he’s outside, well, I would just say he’s a genius — because a lot of people thought Bird was out. But Bird wasn’t really out. He was just advanced. But he wasn’t out.

So I think that a lot of people have to catch up with different artists. But I think as a rule, the average person should learn in, then go out. And if he goes out with taste, he’s not going to stay out there too long. What’s he’s doing that people can relate to, and he’s still using his dynamics correctly . . . And when you go outside and it’s still done with taste, you still have patterns, you have different things that you’re doing that people can relate to. That’s my opinion.

In this next set we’ll also hear something by John Gilmore with Andrew Hill, who came up in Chicago as a child virtuoso in the 1940’s, and made his recorded debut with Von in 1952, I think, with Pat Patrick and a very young Malachi Favors. And I wonder if you might say something about your relationship with Andrew Hill and Malachi Favors.

Well, when I first heard Andrew, Andrew was playing in a Bud Powell vein. This was after Chris and I had parted, and Andrew more or less took his place. He was a great player, but he was playing straight-ahead. Anyway, he eventually went on, and he crossed over into playing his own thing, which some people call avant-garde. I just say he just moved on.

Of course, Malachi Favors then was playing straight-ahead bass, which was great, and he was a good player and had a good tone, and then he went with the Art Ensemble and started his own thing — or their things.

But 1952, of course, was well before that. Does that record exist? Is there a copy of it?

[Laughs] It’s on a label called Ping, and the person who put this out passed, and so I imagine the record . . . well, I know the record is out of print.

But listen, you know one thing? Andrew was playing organ on that record. And no one back in Chicago at that time knew how to record organ. So if you’re listening to the record, you can hardly hear him. But he was an excellent organ player. And on that recording, that’s what he’s playing.

Now we’ll get into a short set on Muhal Richard Abrams, one of the guiding lights of the music in Chicago in the 1960s and ’70s, and someone Von has known for a long time. Let’s talk about Muhal. And you have other things to say, too, I know.

Oh, listen, you just about said it all. The man is a great orchestrator and a great father to a whole lot of the cats, and he taught them all very, very well. Listen. I guess a man that was less than he would have sapped himself, because he’s really given of himself, and he’s helped the music so much. He’s something like Walter Dyett. He taught a lot of these guys discipline through just watching him. And Richard is a very dedicated man. And hey, man, what can I say about him? He’s a great musician, and I love him — plus, he taught my son. I got to love him! Taught him well, too.

You know, speaking of Muhal, another man here who has done so much for the young cats (and I know this personally) is the great Sam Rivers. You know, with his loft sessions he helped many a man pay his rent. And he’s another disciplinarian, you know. Sam doesn’t take any stuff. And of course, his great lady, that lady Bea, she’s a great patron of the arts. I couldn’t say too much about Sam and Bea Rivers.

You were talking before about how Sam Rivers had really developed a style of his own, and that’s something you appreciate.

That’s right, he has a style of his own. And I know how difficult it is in this music to arrive at that.

You were also talking about the difficulties of doubling, and Sam Rivers has developed a personal style on tenor, soprano, flute — and piano for that matter.

That’s the truth. He’s a master musician.

[Music:Muhal-Favors, “W.W.”]

Von, did you have any relationship with the AACM in the 1960’s?

Well, see, what happened, when they first formed, Muhal had come to me and wanted me to be one of the charter members. But I’m more or less a loner, and he understands that. I have my way with the fellows that come around me. I’m more of a guy that teaches by example, I guess, if I’m teaching at all. Osmosis, let’s just put it that way. Muhal was into the fact that he was tired of the jukeboxes dominating the scene. And this is what was really going on. If you had a job and you didn’t really play what was on the jukebox, or something similar to it, the proprietors did not hire you. So he went to a club, which was Transitions East, with a fellow who is gone now named Luba Rashik, who used to help him manage, and they were able to play just what they wanted to play, and they had a built-in crowd. So that’s where it began.

They also played at the Abraham Lincoln Center.

At the Lincoln Center. He did the same thing. And they were able to play their own music. And they had a crowd for it, a built-in audience for it. And of course, when he came to New York, he continued the same thing. And he’s done that all over the world. A very brave, strong, fearless man.

I never did mention that there were some more cats that influenced me heavily, man, like Ornette Coleman, Albert Ayler, and Pharaoh, David Murray and the World Sax Quartet, all of those dudes are some of the baddest cats in the world. And Sam Rivers, of course. You know, I had asked earlier if you’d ever heard of Marion Brown, because Marion Brown is a beautiful player, man. And he plays avant-garde to a certain extent. But these are just some of the cats, man, that . . . Of course, when you do something like this, you should say “and a whole lot of others.” Because you really can’t name everybody. But these are some of the persons that come to mind by the way that some folks call avant-garde or whatever they want to call them. I just call them excellent players.

In any event, ten years ago or so, I had an opportunity to document my feelings about the maestro in a liner note for a reissue of the proceedings of three 1972 sessions that were released contemporaneously on the LPs Get My Own and Big Bad Jug, which I’ve posted below.

Gene Ammons, “Fine and Mellow” (Liner Notes):

No tenor saxophonist of his generation understood melody more profoundly than Gene Ammons, whose ability to make his metal instrument emulate the human voice with unparalleled presence and dramatic weight gave him great stature among his peer group.

“Jug’s one of my heroes of all time,” says tenor saxophonist Von Freeman, referring to Ammons by his nickname. Now 81 and saying more on the tenor than just about anyone alive, Freeman met Ammons, two years his junior, in the middle 1930s at South Side Chicago’s DuSable High School, where both studied under the famous taskmaster Walter Dyett. “I give him a lot of credit, because he sort of opened up the saxophone around Chicago. Then again, he’s one of those cats that was playing in between Hawk and Prez, just like the rest of us.”

Freeman is referring to the way individualistic tenormen like himself and Ammons, Eddie Lockjaw Davis, Paul Gonsalves, Wardell Gray, Lucky Thompson and Frank Wess — ’20s-born musicians who assimilated Coleman Hawkins and Lester Young before Charlie Parker entered the picture — blended Hawkins’ charging, arpeggiated, straight-up-and-down attack and thick operatic tone with Young’s relaxed, fluid, float-like-a-butterfly, bel canto conjurations. Ammons played economically, and he could accent his lines with stirring blues vocalizations, like Muddy Waters playing bebop saxophone. He had an unerring inner metronome, honed during an Art Blakey-booted two-year stint in Billy Eckstine’s orchestra; one Ammons note would launch the beat and the swing, and that note would permeate the room — or speaker. Plus, the ladies dug him; Ammons could bleed you to death with a ballad, smooth with quiet fire, like his idol Nat King Cole, or, a la Mario Lanza, oozing vibrato to maximize the melodrama.

Ammons possessed an incredibly powerful embouchure (Freeman recalls once seeing him snap off a saxophone neck while blowing), and in certain ways, his larger-than-life sound, which projected pain and jubilation in equal measure and seemed to emanate from deep in his innards, disguised his extreme musical sophistication. He inherited his rawer musical chromosomes from his father, Albert Ammons, the legendary boogie-woogie pianist-church deacon. He got the finesse from his mother, a music teacher and classical pianist.

“I used to go by Jug’s house,” Freeman recalls: ” They used to call me Lord Riff, because I could riff on anything, but I didn’t know what I was doing. One day when I was about 14, his mother said to me, ‘Son, you’re playing by ear, aren’t you.’ She’d been on her son about that years earlier. She said, ‘The ear is beautiful, but you should learn more about chords. Come over here.’ Then she sat down at the piano and started playing chords. She started me out.”

On the three autumn 1972 sessions that comprise “Fine and Mellow,” the 47-year-old, three years out of his second stint in jail, enters Rudy Van Gelder’s studio with a cohort of New York A-list studio pros, quickly comprehends the form and the texture of the songs and arrangements – here a melange of Billie Holiday material chosen to exploit the release of “Lady Sings The Blues,” MOR pop, and a few elemental originals suffused with funk-tinged blues sensibility – and lays down a succession of declamations that contain a surfeit of heart and soul, with the occasional wild edge, as he had done for the previous quarter-century on a series of jukebox staples like “My Foolish Heart” and “Canadian Sunset.”

It’s the sound and approach that made Ammons the people’s choice in Chicago from 1947, when he formed his own unit after Eckstine disbanded, until his death in 1974. “One night we had five gigs, all dances,” recalls pianist Junior Mance, who joined Ammons not long after he departed from Mercury Records, for which he recorded ‘Red Top,’ his first big hit. “In Gary, Indiana, which was our third gig, Jug’s car broke down and we couldn’t get back to the fourth. The club-owner took Jug to the union, and they called us down. We’re all sitting there, and Harry Gray, the local president, said: ‘You guys know better; why did you follow him in doing five gigs?’ Which was a stupid question. If anybody offers me five gigs in one night and I think I can do it… Anyway, our drummer, Ellis Bartee, who was just out of the Lionel Hampton band and who was very quick, said, ‘Well, Mr. Gray, I’m just here from Kansas City. When I came here, all I saw was the name Gene Ammons all over everywhere, because he’s the most popular. So I just figured, well, that’s the man to be with. I didn’t know we weren’t supposed to work five gigs in a night.’ They all laughed, and that got us off the hook.”

Musicians as diverse as Johnny Griffin, Clifford Jordan, Sonny Rollins and Henry Threadgill were hooked on Ammons. “Gene Ammons was sort of an idol of mine,” Rollins told me a few years ago. “He was out there doing it when I was still in school, and he was one of the older guys that I looked up to and respected a great deal. When I got to Chicago I had the opportunity of playing several times with Gene, and got to know him more as a colleague.”

Threadgill recalls a memorable week in 1961 or 1962 when Ammons guested with the Sonny Rollins Quartet at McKie’s, a popular 63rd Street club that Rollins immortalized in a song. “You can often hear things live that will never get on record,” Threadgill stated on WKCR in 1996. “On Sunday night, they locked the doors around 2:30 or 3 o’clock, and wouldn’t let anybody else in. They played until morning. I had no idea Gene Ammons could play like that. He was playing pieces up in the harmonic section, the altissimo of the tenor saxophone, and never played below that. Very high notes, played all of these melodies an octave higher than Sonny Rollins. It was quite a lesson.”

Tenor players at all levels will find lessons aplenty in these sessions. Listen to Ammons bellow out his statement on “Lucille,” an impassioned love cry penned by Harold Vick. He imparts maximum blues impact with a minimum of notes on the downhome “Tin Shack Out Back” and on “Lady Mama,” the latter an elemental vamp on the chords of “Freedom Jazz Dance,” written by fellow DuSable alumnus Eddie Harris, who as a youngster subbed for pianist James Craig on Ammons dances at Chicago’s Pershing Ballroom. He squeezes every bit of melodic juice from “Can’t Help Myself” and “God Bless The Child,” and, in the company of maestros Hank Jones and Ron Carter, evokes the surreal ambiance of “Strange Fruit.”

For all his personal problems, Ammons played with remarkable consistency, and these statements, like so much of his finest work, transcend the particulars of time and place and genre. With the reissue of “Fine and Mellow” another piece of his career mosaic falls into place, and we are the richer for it.

A few months after I joined WKCR for what would be a 23-year run, I made it my business to interview pianist Chris Anderson, who, despite the dual handicap of being both sightless and brittle-boned, made an enormous, underground impact on piano vocabulary as a person who famously influenced, among others, Ahmad Jamal, Herbie Hancock, and Denny Zeitlin as young pianists on the Chicago scene. You could still hear Chris play at this time, and he continued to have it together, as evidenced not only by the duo album with Charlie Haden titled None But The Lonely Heart, but also a terrific trio date for DIW titled Blues One with Ray Drummond and Billy Higgins that followed a memorable week at Bradley’s in 1991, which was also documented on a 1994 date on Alsut.

Chris and I had two long conversations. The first took place in his apartment; the second comes from an in-person “Musician Show” at WKCR. In honor of the 87th anniversary of his birth I’m appending the complete transcripts below.

* * * * *

Chris Anderson (3-16-86):

TP: Chris, let’s start with the basic facts. Are you originally from Chicago, Illinois?

CA: Yes, I was born there.

TP: What year was that?

CA: 1926.

TP: Tell me about your beginnings in music. How old were you when you first played the piano?

CA: It would be easier probably… I loved music, and I listened to a lot of it on the radio, the standard fare of the day, on the Jazz station — it was called Black Music or Race Music in those days. But I found myself trying to pick out… I found that I could pick out melodies on piano. And the harmony that goes with it, I knew in my head…I knew what it was — if I could just find it on the piano. It’s like taking off boxing gloves. I knew it would take a minute. Because I knew I had an ear for harmony and melody, particularly harmony. So I always knew from the get-go that I was going to play, was going to be a musician.

TP: Who did you hear on the radio?

CA: Oh, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, but mostly, oh, the popular singers of the day — Bing Crosby, Perry Como, all of them.

TP: And they’d be on the radio, and that’s how you…

CA: Yeah.

TP: Did you ever get out to hear live music in Chicago when you were a youngster?

CA: When I was a kid, no. When I was really a kid… What got me into going places was when I got involved in music, got playing music, and then it forced me to meet people to play some kind of… I knew some people… They used to have things called tramp bands, with a guitar, bass, stuff like that. The bass fiddle would be a washtub with a stick and a rope nailed up to it. You’d turn the tub upside-down on the ground, and you’d nail a stick to it vertically from the ground up, and then you’d pass the stick up around the top, and you’d tie a big knot in the end of the string, and with the hole in the center of the tub, you’d pull it through that tub from the underside, you know, exerting tension on it — like a saw, the same you’d play a saw. And you had your bass fiddle.

I got to know these people, and some of these people graduated into being professional musicians. A professional bass player, a professional guitarist, stuff like that. And they told me about places where music was played. They said, “If you’re interested in music, you ought to go and hear some people play.” And they took me.

TP: Do you remember where they took you?

CA: Oh! That’s when I started learning about the… What’s the name of the place that Earl Hines played…?

TP: The Grand Terrace.

CA: Yes, the Grand Terrace, places like that. A place called Old-Timers on 47th and Cottage Grove. I don’t think there were too many. Oh, and of course on the West Side.

TP: What did you remember about Earl Hines’ band in the 1930’s and early Forties?

CA: Well, see, as far as Earl Hines is concerned, I didn’t get to know a lot about Earl Hines then. And Swing, as far as black people were concerned, was on its last legs. Bebop was getting ready to be born. The Grand Terrace closed for a while, and that was Earl Hines’ stomping grounds. And the War, World War Two closed down so many big bands because they couldn’t afford it any more. Everybody was going away, going into the Service. Everybody was putting together small combos.

That’s the only thing that gave me a shot at music. I remember asking my harmony teacher in high school if I could play professionally, and he said, “No, not unless you surround yourself with musicians who can get the jobs.” But being just a teacher and not a musician, he didn’t understand that the big band… The people in the sections had to read, but reading wasn’t necessarily going to be the most important thing for a while. So a lot of people got to learn and so forth.

TP: By the way, I didn’t hear where it was that you went to high school and primary school.

CA: I went to Douglas Grammar School in Chicago, and I went to Philips High School for a while, and then I also went to Marshall High School.

TP: Who was the bandmaster at Phillips High School. I know that’s where Walter Dyett had taught before he went to DuSable.

CA: Yeah!

TP: But who was there when you were there?

CA: Let me see… I don’t remember his name. He was German. He was a German teacher. He was a character, too; he was a real character. I can’t remember… The (?) was in the band, but I couldn’t remember his name.

TP: What years are we talking about?

CA: I graduated from grammar school in ’41, now that I think about it. So ’41 to…

TP: Then when you first played professionally, were you still in high school or was that after you graduated from high school?

CA: I didn’t graduate from high school. Now, I had one more semester to go, and I got a chance to go on the road with a guitarist named Leo Blevins, who was very much a part of the Chicago scene. You having talked to a lot of people, people could have told you about him. He introduced a lot of people to a lot of other people. Anyway, I got a chance to go to Denver, Colorado, with Leo.. Well, it wasn’t his job. It was a bass player named Louis Phillips. And he had a chance to go to Denver.

No, my first gig actually was in Chicago at a place called the Hurricane on 55th Street, next to the Rhumboogie. I remember one of my first gigs, next door, a great guitarist who used to play with… I can’t remember his name either. He used to play with (?)Billy Slack(?), who had a very popular national hit — Billy Slack. A Blues guitar player…

Anyway, that was my first gig. Then after that, I went to Denver, Colorado for about two weeks. We were supposed to be gone longer than that, but the bass player got very ill, an illness that he never recovered from. I came home. Leo stayed a few weeks longer, until the bass player’s family could come get him home.

In fact, one of the reasons I left Denver to go back, couldn’t stay out there, I decided, “Well, I’ll go back and finish my last semester of school.” I got back the first of September, got home, and started over, and decided not to go back. I decided pretty much that music was going to be my livelihood, and you don’t need any education but music. [CHUCKLES] You understand? So I didn’t finish.

TP: What kind of music were playing in that band when you went to Denver? Was it Jump band type music?

CA: Yes…

TP: Was it sort of precursors to Bop?

CA: Well, from Jump to Bop… It was quite a thing from there. It was not like people in New York were doing, see. Because all the musically literate people were in New York, people that really were studying. Everybody else was just like playing cafes, or parties, or played strip joints. Just Jump and the Blues. And most of these people didn’t know many tunes. They just knew seventeen different types of Blues, and make it sound different, or some “Rhythm” changes, and they knew a few standard tunes — the people that I met in Chicago anyway. There were a lot of old standards. There were a lot of old-timers who knew a lot of real old tunes. These were the ones who knew a lot, the ones who were a lot older and had been around a lot longer, so they were the ones who were more likely to have been locked in the style of the late Twenties and Thirties, see.

That’s why I say making that jump, the music… In Chicago making that jump into Bebop was quite a thing. The young Turks coming along were… Well, they weren’t quite in the music, just on their way into the music.

TP: In Chicago in 1943, Earl Hines did have Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, although I know they were traveling and Chicago was just the base. But did you ever get to hear that band?

CA: Unh-uh.

TP: No.

CA: I was just beginning to get into music then. I didn’t know anything about Charlie Parker. I didn’t know anything about Bebop! I didn’t know anything about anything. And I hope the point of your question is not “What do you know now?” because I’d have to say I don’t know very much!

See, with Earl Hines… The thing is, the advantage of the big band, you could solo a little bit and you could kind of make it, but the big thing is that all you had to do was learn the discipline of reading, being professional, and they just took care of the business for you. And the exceptional people that would come along, like Charlie Parker, who were going to make an art in their generation, make a new art form, out of a solo style that doesn’t need… In fact, a big band would get in their way most of the time. Even Satchmo, as much of an innovator as he was in his time, didn’t play enough notes to get in the big band’s way. Not that Charlie Parker would get in a big band’s way now. He’d play across it. He could play right across it. But it’s kind of… It was a different thing. People were beginning to look… Plus, the war years had gotten people used to listening to something else besides the big bands, so soloists had to do more as part of their playing and part of what they wanted to do, too!

I didn’t get a chance to hear any of that… Before 1945? No.

TP: When you got back from that ill-fated trip to Denver, Chris, did you begin to gig around Chicago? What was your process from that to working somewhat regularly?

CA: Well, the process was cementing relationships, developing relationships. I knew what I was going to do, or at least I didn’t have anything else to do. I found myself being with musicians for a good part of my time. That’s how you make contacts, and if you’re a go-getter and you hustle and do all these things (I never was a great hustler), then sometimes you just …(?)…

Music was developing, people were hearing about Bebop. The music was beginning to come alive in Chicago. For instance, there was a place in Chicago on 29th and Indiana called The Hole. And that’s where everybody would meet, experimenting with this new music. It was an after-hours joint, and it opened at 12, from 12 until about 7. So everybody who was interested in music would be there, you know. And that was where we began to find out about this music. We already had a feeling before we were there. But the thing is, with everybody in the same spot, you got to know everybody! See?

TP: Who were some of the people that you remember getting to know at that time?

CA: Well, I had heard of Wilbur Ware, a young bass player who I’d heard around. This fellow Leo Blevins, that I was telling you about, told me about Wilbur Ware. Leo introduced me to so many people and introduced other people to so many people. He was the kind of person who if he would walk in here now and tell me that the most unlikely person that I could imagine was a good player, I’d have to believe it. It seems that at that time, right then and there, Wilbur was in Milwaukee with Little Jazz; he wouldn’t be in town for another week. And I waited, and looked forward to it — and he was a person that was part of Chicago, one of the people I was most impressed with all of my life. That started it. I’d see many of the people who were going to be the mainstays, people who you’d look up to just as part of the music.

Shortly after that, Sonny Stitt came to town. He lived there for a while. I got to know him. He worked around. As good as he was, as great as he was… Well, he was one of the pioneers; a pioneer, you know, in Bird’s footsteps. But there was another fellow there named Henry Prior, and he was great, too, but he met a very untimely death, very early — about 1945 or ’46 maybe.

Anyway, the first gig I ever really had… I worked with Sonny Stitt with other people, in other people’s bands there. The first gig I had with Sonny Stitt was on an Easter, about ’47, I think. It was the Bird at the Pershing Ballroom. And that’s how I got to meet Bird. I worked with Bird a total of three times. And that was amazing.

Well, actually, it was Leo who introduced me to Sonny Stitt. We worked at another gig at a place called the…it was on the West Side…

TP: You and Sonny Stitt worked a gig on the West Side before you went into the Pershing?

CA: Yes. As part of his rhythm section. It was a famous club, I think on 47th and Western or something. We worked opposite Jackie Cain and Roy Kral. I remember that.

TP: Were you working with a regular rhythm section at the time, and you’d accompany people?

CA: No, we’d just put the rhythm section together for that particular gig. It was just two weekend gigs.

TP: And shortly thereafter you went into the Pershing?

CA: Mmm-hmm.

TP: I’ve read that you were part of the house rhythm section at the Pershing Ballroom, and you played there with Bruz Freeman and Leroy Jackson, that you were the standing rhythm section to back up the soloists.

CA: Standing… Try sitting. Because it just worked out. You could say that. People get strange… There were a couple of… The last two appearances I made at the Pershing with Bird, one was with Von Freeman’s group — Von, Bruz and Leroy and so forth. The other was with a tenor player who used to be there named Claude McLin.

The one with Von wasn’t Von’s gig. I don’t remember how it came about. The pianist on the gig was named Prentice McCrary. I happened to come in, and they let me sit in. And somebody recorded it. They had a wire recorder. In fact, the way they recorded this thing, they had a back room behind the bandstand at the Pershing, and they had a speaker on the wall back there. They recorded this off the speaker. And they put this out on a record. And doing the research for this record, the people were going back in their memory, because this wasn’t… They didn’t try to get the documentation and stuff together. This was in the Seventies! They went to Bruz Freeman and a few other people, and they told them I was on the gig. I was not on the gig! I just happened to be sitting in. See?

So what I’m getting at is the information concerning this, because being part of the expanding house band… It was the luck of the draw. Let me show you how much it is a luck of the draw, things can happen to you. The third time, the last time I worked there with Claude McLin, this session was recorded, too. In fact, it was put out in about 1975 or something like that.

I was raised in a foster home. And I went to school with some kids who became close friends of mine, about three or four of them. They kicked around in foster homes, too. And they were brothers. So for a time we lived together in different spots. And we figured out… Like, the oldest brother that looked after them, he said, “Okay, I’m working; I’m going to take care of this aspect. Chris, I want you to take care of his cultural needs.” They knew I was a musician and so forth, and knew a few things in terms of Black culture, or whatever else there is to learn at that particular time. They wanted to keep him out of trouble. You know what I mean?

So this Sunday we were sitting around, we haven’t got any money, and I wanted to go hear Bird so bad! And I wanted to take him to hear Bird, because he hadn’t heard Bird. He had listened to his records. He was a sensitive(?) kid, bright, and liked good music. He just liked to move his foot. He liked to stomp his foot to music. So anyway, I’m really disappointed, because I told him I would like to hear Bird, and he would like it… It didn’t annoy him that much. But it annoyed me. I was getting pretty depressed about it. And he was trying to make conversation with me, and I’m not listening.

We were living in a rooming house. So someone came and knocked on the door and told me there was a phone call for me. I went to the phone, and it’s this guy Claude McLin, who said, “Look, what you doing?” He said, “Look, my piano player can’t make it. I’ve got this gig here with Bird…” [LAUGHS]

So that’s how I got on that one. You know? There was no standing rhythm section. They didn’t have no standing… A lot of times you’d work there with different people, then they’d call you standing. It’s not like the owner of the Pershing would say, “Well, you work every week with this guy and this guy,” you know.

But the people who worked there were people like Von Freeman (he worked there quite often) Claude McLin (he worked there sometimes) and a few other people. And there not a lot of pianists there! So that increased your chances. See? So everybody was getting a lot of the same events. You see what I mean?

TP: Another person you were associated with who was very prominent at the time and not that widely known about, one was the great drummer Ike Day.

CA: Yes. The first thing… You’ve heard a lot said about Ike Day, so I won’t be redundant…

TP: Well, I’ll tell you something. I haven’t heard a lot said about Ike Day, so I don’t think anything that you say about him will be redundant. I’ve heard a little bit about Ike Day.

CA: Okay. First, Chicago in the Forties, as I told you, before Bebop everything was Blues Swing… Before they called it Rhythm-and-Blues, it was just Blues — Supper Blues, Steak(?) Blues, whatever you wanted to call it.

This had to be about 1943. I had to still be in school — yes, of course; I was still in school. And I joined the big band… Because it was like the way… Just take a bunch of musicians in any high school in this land, whether it’s the Music Department, they learn to read, and somewhere in the high school or on the fringes of the high school, someone puts together a swing band. These musicians aren’t very good. And then they had this big band that most of the kids would end up in. A lot of the kids made it out of Phillips High School in the school band and so forth.

We worked a few places, like in community centers and stuff like that. I remember the first gig I had at the community center; I got paid a whole fifty cents! One night we got a gig called the Apex out in Robbins, Illinois. It happened to be Ike’s home base; Ike and his mother lived out there. And we went into this club. On the way we heard a strange noise. “What’s that?” We heard a drop(?). “What the hell is this? What’s going on?” We’d never heard anything like this before. The first thing that comes into our head, what’s wrong with these guys… Well, we’re late in the first place. We’d never been out there before. The driver didn’t know where we were going. We were late. So I said, “Oh, they hired another band.”

We walk in the other door, it’s no other band — just Ike Day. It turns out they had been running… They had a floor show there, and on this floor show they had this Blues guitar player named Johnny Shines. He was like Muddy Waters to me. Pure Blues, you understand? They had a shake dancer, and for music they had Ike Day playing. But the thing is, they were all separate acts. They thought so much of Ike Day out there, and Ike Day was so great, that Ike Day came in there and worked, just playing drums! And he used to have to play a little solo for about twenty minutes, then he was through for the night. He might play for the shake dancer if he wanted to. He didn’t play for the guitar player. The guitar player played by himself.

That’s how great he was. It’s as if… Someone once asked Earl Weaver about Brooks Robinson as a third baseman. You know how great he was.

TP: Yes.

CA: Okay. He asked Earl Weaver, “How great is Brooks?” He said, “You know, he plays third base as if he came down from another league.” That’s the way Ike was. He played drums like… He didn’t play loud drums. He was just so… Everybody was so awed, in awe of him, he was so great… Everyone was around him all the time, because he was just great. You know? He just was! You see? And I didn’t know what anything was about yet! [ETC.]

You think about how you assess things when it first happens to you, and the only thing that may make it valid are the changes thirty or forty or fifty years later; you can look at it, and you seem to still feel the same way. That was the darnedest thing I have ever seen! I have never seen anything like this.

This man was… And they had a lot of professional people coming in and out of this club, working at different times. You know? But just what was going on then… Man, we used to tease our drummer in our band, our big band — because this was a big band, about 12 or 13 or 14 pieces. We said, “Well, how long do you think you’re gonna last?” — we teased him! “You’ll be playing…” Or during intermission or something, he’d come back and find a cymbal missing, somebody had taken it and hid it. We teased him all the time.

In about two weeks, our drummer got the word that we can’t afford to have two drummers. So Ike wound up playing with our band for a while. Of course, the only thing our band could play were leaders'(?) arrangements and stock arrangements, Basie band, Jimmy Dorsey and stuff like that. That was the fare in those days. The change hadn’t been made yet, see. That’s why I tell you that ’43-’44 is what I’m talking about now.

TP: But you knew Ike Day over the years, though, until he passed.

CA: Oh, yes. I was in the hospital when he passed. I had a broken hip. Oh yes, I was in the hospital. He died of tuberculosis.

TP: And you played with him also over the years in any number of situations, small groups and larger groups and so forth?

CA: Small groups. I never got to play with him in large groups, no.

TP: Well, one thing, there’s a picture I’ve seen on the back of a record jacket, a Chess compilation of Chicago tenor players. And there’s Max Roach and Kenny Dorham all standing right over Ike Day and watching him play, and Max Roach has a look of rapt concentration on his face. Was this the kind of impact he made on everybody?

CA: Pretty much. Pretty much. Well, you see, people like Max and people who are sure enough great… And there was not only him. People like Jo Jones, Papa Jo Jones. When he knew he was going to retire, he tried to get…he wanted Ike to take his seat in the band. But Ike wasn’t thinking about going out on the road. Buddy Rich, all the drummers… All the drummers knew about him, and all the other musicians knew about him. But they didn’t all rhapsodize over him that much, because you took him for granted.

Ike was good with people, too. See, that’s another thing.

[ETC.]

Vernell Fournier had a stool that belonged to Ike Day, a drum stool that belonged to Ike Day for years. He wouldn’t let anyone touch that stool. I don’t know if Vernell still has it. But he revered it so much, he kept that drum stool for years, all those years, because Ike Day sat on it.

TP: So I guess you were playing around town in these various situations in the late Forties and early Fifties. Would you go on the road with people for brief periods of time, or were you mainly just around Chicago?

CA: I stayed on Chicago. Going on the road… Me being handicapped was a problem. Besides, it wasn’t something that I wanted to do anyway. I went on the road for very short periods, two or three weeks at the most. And that was in the late Fifties. In the mid to late Fifties I did it for a while, with just one person, a guy named Cozy Eccleston, who had a rhythm-and-blues band in Chicago.

TP: Cozy Eccleston?

CA: Yeah! I went out with him. In fact, for a rhythm-and-blues band, he had one of the hippest rhythm sections that the world has ever seen. He had Wilbur Ware and a drummer named Dorel Anderson, who was part of the scene there (he was a great drummer who died also), and me. We went out a couple of times.

TP: That was in the latter part of the Fifties?

CA: Yes.

TP: Were you able to stretch out at all in any of those situations you played in?

CA: Well, he would love to go do his thing, and then he’d go sit at the bar drinking, listening to us! [LAUGHS]

TP: I don’t blame him.

CA: [LAUGHS] We didn’t get to stretch out a lot. It was his band and his program. He wouldn’t let things get out of hand. The thing is, the (?) stuff, we found a way to loosen it up. You know? We’d take it gently by the hand and make the music a little more endurable.

TP: There’s another story (tell me whether this is true or not) that you were in the rhythm section at the Beehive during Charlie Parker’s last appearance in Chicago. Is that correct or not? That was around February 1955.

CA: That I was working? No. I think Norman Simmons worked that job. Norman Simmons and Victor Sproles had that job at the Beehive.

[END OF SIDE A]

TP: What were the circumstances that brought you to New York?

CA: I got a chance to come out on the road with Dinah Washington. Joe Zawinul had just left her to go with Cannonball. And she had this club that had been called the Roberts Show Lounge; she bought it and changed it to Dinah-Land, and she worked there for a while. And while they were there, Joe Zawinul handed in his notice, because he’d made a commitment to Cannonball. So she tried a couple of local pianists there, and nobody really wanted to go on the road that much, and nothing was happening for me. So Eddie Chamblee and Leo Blevins, again, this guitarist again, told her about me. This is what I was telling you about. He’s a person who really helped a lot of people there. It was really because of him I got that job.

So I came… Let’s see. I think it was exactly six weeks. We went to Philadelphia first for two days at Pep’s. We went to the Howard in Washington for a week, then we went to the Apollo for a week. Then we went to Town Hill in Brooklyn. And she was coming back to Chicago, and I decided I wanted to stay here in New York. Well, everything can’t be perfect, but I don’t want to deal with any negatives now. Thanks to her, I got here, you understand, and I stayed here.

TP: Did you have work when you first got to New York?

CA: No. But, let’s see, I got work… I went through a very bad period there for a couple of years. I broke some more bones, and I was kind of out of it for a while. I had to really get my act together. I never did do a lot of working in New York until three or four years ago actually. I’d get a gig now and then, but I only had a few.

TP: You did record, though, in 1961.

CA: Oh yes, when I first got here. Well, see, the reason why that came about, Orrin Keepnews was connected with Riverside at that time, and he happened to be in Chicago. Johnny Griffin had told him to come hear me. He wanted him to record me. And he came by to see me and said, “If you’re ever in New York, let me know, and we’ll do a date with you.” So I happened to be here. So I called him and told him, “Well, I’m here.” So he gave me a date. So that’s how that came about. That was through the good offices of Johnny Griffin.

TP: Another one of your old running mates in Chicago?

CA: Yeah.

TP: Can you pinpoint when you were first aware of Johnny Griffin, when you first heard him play?

CA: My memory of first hearing him is kind of vague, because the music was in the midst of change, and I was hearing a lot of other people. But he was fresh out of high school, came out of Captain Dyett’s band, like so many great people, like Jug, Gene Ammons, and like…

TP: Well, your friend Clifford Jordan came out of DuSable.

CA: Clifford Jordan. And what’s this great bass player…?

TP: Richard Davis.

CA: Richard Davis. Victor Sproles came out of there, too. And Gene Ammons, as I said… Anyway…

TP: Von Freeman also went to DuSable.

CA: Von Freeman, yes. Von, Bruz, George — the whole family.

Anyway, you asked me about him being called Little Giant. My memory failed me; I didn’t connect it at first. I consider it apocryphal. But there may been a reason for it. I can trace it to a time… And I heard about this more. I didn’t see it happen. But I didn’t know… When he… The thing that brought Johnny Griffin to the attention of the world, he got a chance to go with Lionel Hampton. And that was a time when Arnett Cobb was with him. Arnett Cobb was big. And that’s back in the days when you had these saxophone battles, the same way as in those days they’d have these big band battles. Johnny Griffin happened to join Hamp during an engagement at a place called the Rialto Theatre. The Rialto Theatre was a strip joint, but they changed it to a theatre. And Lionel Hampton was the opener; he opened that place. By the time Lionel Hampton and these two cats, Arnett Cobb and Johnny Griffin… They excited people so they threw people out, three fell out of the balconies… It was a riot! They closed that place after about two or three performances — the place couldn’t stand it! They turned it back into a strip joint!

And the clash, the battle between David and Goliath… See what I’m getting at? And out of this, I think Johnny Griffin got the name the Little Giant. Well, everybody wants to go for the underdog, you know. The new music was just beginning. But Griffin, he was into everybody else’s thing, Arnett Cobb honking and playing… But Bebop, the new music hadn’t filtered through. They’d play a few notes, but the new music hadn’t been born. But as far as sound was concerned, he held his own with Arnett Cobb! Everybody goes for the underdog. But he was the underdog only in size, so they called him the Little Giant.

TP: You played with Johnny Griffin quite a bit, though, around Chicago — yes or no?

CA: Not a lot. No.

TP: But at any rate, he of course knew you and you’d known each other a while, and that’s why he referred you for this date.

CA: Yes.

TP: I’d like to ask you about some of the tunes you did on the date. I don’t know if you remember it; if not, I’ll refresh your memory.

CA: Oh, yes, I remember.

TP: Were these tunes that you’d been playing for many years? Is the material on Inverted Image representative of the type of set you would play in Chicago?

CA: No. No, because… Well, the title of the album was decided upon pretty much before we… I don’t remember who came up with the idea for it. I think it was Orrin Keepnews who came up with the title, and the idea of the Rorschach thing. He said, “Okay, this should have a song for it.” So I wrote a kind of upside-down Blues; half the changes were upside-down, or inverted — I turned them around. So it all sounded like the Blues, but the (?) bars go in different directions, and you don’t know what it is until the last two bars. So that’s the inverted image.

Now, I wrote that, but Bill Lee wrote most of the rest of it. He wrote the ballad called “Only One.” There were a lot of standards.

TP: There’s also a collaboration called “See You Saturday.”

CA: No, that’s no collaboration. That’s Bill Lee’s tune.

TP: And everything else is a standard.

CA: Right.

TP: “Lullaby Of The Leaves,” which Johnny Griffin did a great version of once on a record, “My Funny Valentine”… These were tunes that you’d been playing for quite some time, that were part of your standard…

CA: Yes.

TP: Von Freeman, when I interviewed him, said that you had the greatest harmonic ear that he had ever heard. Do you feel that you had any impact on other pianists who came up in Chicago during the Fifties?

CA: There are a couple of people who I influenced in Chicago, I know for sure. But I don’t think anybody else I influenced at all. They were going their own way and doing their thing. Because to really be influenced… Well, what I mean by influenced, a pianist to influence another pianist, you’ve got to spend time with him. Or if he plays something a little bit like you, in a song he finds a change or finds a way to voice something, that’s okay, but it’s not no big thing.

But to influence somebody, what I call influence, is maybe… As far as piano is concerned, there is only one pianist in Chicago that I have influenced, and he doesn’t live there any more. His name is Billy Wallace. The reason being we spent a lot of time together. We got into each other’s heads. I know what he knows, he knows what I know. And we know why.

TP: Billy Wallace played with Max Roach for some time…

CA: Yes, he did. And there was a bass player there named Bill Lee. He can play the piano and he arranges. But I’m talking about influencing him not so much on piano, but musically, in terms of every facet of it. People like John Young, Jodie Christian, Willie Pickens, the piano players that were there? No, I didn’t influence them at all. Muhal Richard Abrams? No.

[PAUSE]

There was something I wanted to tell you about this album, Inverted Image. It really didn’t sell very much. In fact, for a while, everybody I knew had got the album, they went by Riverside and got a free copy! I didn’t know anyone that ever bought it. It didn’t sell well. They didn’t promote it, of course. And to my mind, it’s not indicative of the thing I do the best.

And lately, the last four or five years… There was a thing we went through in the Seventies where there was no pianos to play, so you had to buy an electric piano, or even worse, before that, you had the organ in the Fifties and so forth — and they had such lousy pianos. Now they’ve got good pianos in most places, they have a grand piano. And more than a bebopper, I’m a sort of painter, in a sense. My friends have put me in the kinds of situations that allow me to do what I do best. Some people say I’m trying to be a Classical pianist, and that’s a painter, you know. Or you can call me a house painter! I’ll accept that. I’m still painting. Sometimes I like to play by myself. I like to paint around singers.

[-30-]

* * *

Chris Anderson (4-9-86) – (WKCR):

[MUSIC: BIRD IN CHICAGO, PERSHING BALLROOM]

TP: In the first part of the show we’ll focus on musicians Chris was involved with in Chicago, where he was an active member of the scene for about a 15-year period, wasn’t it, between 1946 and 1961 or so.

CA: Yes, that’s about it. Actually a few more years than that. But professionally, yes, you could say fifteen years. But I started playing around in the mid to late Forties. So it’s really more like twenty years. But yes, 1945 to 1961 professionally.

TP: Chris, tell us about working at the Pershing Ballroom. You played there quite frequently and different people would come in. What was the set-up like there?

CA: Well, the Pershing Ballroom was just that. It was a ballroom, a dance hall. They gave dances. But the thing is, in dealing with Jazz, dance halls were just used as a place for people to stand. People really began to listen more… Jazz was changing from something to dance to, to a music to listen to. You’d have a place like this with maybe, oh, twenty-five hundred people, nothing but wall-to-wall people. It was quite a thing. It was a dance hall in name only, because there was no room for anybody to dance in most cases. And even when they were, it was just… A stand-up nightclub, that’s all it was. That’s the best way to explain it.

TP: The Pershing also had an upstairs and a downstairs room. They would book two different bands at one time. Is that not right?

CA: Yes. Well, they had a place called Budland in the basement. Well, they had something there every week. That was dealing with the local musicians more than having big names come in. Big names would only come in once in a while, you see, so it wasn’t really quite the same thing. And there was the Pershing Lounge, so really there was three places in the same building. And that’s where Ahmad Jamal would hold fort for a long time, and put the Pershing on the map.

TP: Tell us about this date with Bird. What were the circumstances of that evening?

CA: You want to go through that again.

TP: Well, we went through it before, but that’s all right.

CA: Remember we were talking about the fact that I was supposed to be part of the regular house rhythm section there, and I explained to you that it didn’t happen that way at all. The saxophone player, Claude McLin, his piano player couldn’t make it for some reason. And I wanted to go so bad, I didn’t know what to do. I was sitting around the house depressed. And I got this call from Claude McLin, who asked me to come, and I got to hear Bird, and not only hear Bird, but to play with him. Of course, I had heard him before I played with him, once before, but at least it got me in. I had to work a little, but it was a pleasure. That’s about all there is to that.

[MUSIC: JUG-STITT, “Saxification”; JUG, “Down The Line”]

A strange incident happened to us once when we were working in Chicago. I teased Jug about it for years! I have to explain to you first, Chicago is known for the Blues, and there was a time that Blues was much more alive as Jazz than it was Rock-and-Roll before Rock-and-Roll came in. This was before Blues players made a lot of money. They made no money. So the Blues players were in a certain section of Chicago, called the West Side. They stayed on the West Side, while we stayed on the South Side.

TP: The Jazz musicians stayed on the South Side and the Blues musicians on the West Side.

CA: Yes, and never the twain shall meet. So a gig came along, and Jug having a name, we went over there. A friend of ours, a guitarist I’ve told you about, was very important in my life. His name was Leo Blevins. Now, he came from a Blues background… What I mean as Blues, he came from that genre, he could fit in just as well with Muddy Waters, Memphis Slim, anybody who played Jazz… In those days musicians did some of everything, and they did it with feeling. Whatever was going on, they did it with feeling.

So we had this gig. It was a Blues house. There was not many people in the house, oh, maybe ten people. It sounded like three, the way it was scattered around. And we went into playing the Blues, what I mean, the Shuffle Blues. The rhythm was like ta-CHONK, ta-CHONK, ta-CHONK. It would be like what Memphis Slim was doing or something like that. Back in those days, guitar players would get down on their knees, I’ve seen bass players lie down on the floor and play their bass. They were required to be very entertaining.

So we finished this number. And everybody said, “Hmm, so this is a Blues house, huh? This ought to take care of them. That ought to fix them.” All of a sudden we heard a voice way in the back: “When you gonna play me some Blues?!”

And we stood there just dismayed, just stupidly! We hadn’t done a thing. And I teased Jug about this for years. I never would let him forget it. Sometimes people have a little antipathy toward each other anyway, and I teased him with that from now til Doomsday. I always think of that when I hear Jug play the Blues. But he was a wonderful Blues player; it was just a different thing.

TP: When did you start playing with Jug? How did you meet him?

CA: I don’t even remember how I met Jug. That’s something I could not tell you. See, I was not close to Jug. I was not close to Jug in the least. He had a name. He was in and out of town quite a lot. He was not a part of the Jazz scene when I got into it — or a regular part of the Jazz scene. He was in New York and traveling and stuff like that, so I didn’t get to know him that well. See? Just in the latter years that I was there I’d see him occasionally, work with him or something. But I don’t have a memory of when I met him. I don’t.

TP: [MUSIC OF JOE WILLIAMS]

CA: There is something that has always bothered me, it’s annoyed the hell out of me! — excuse the expression. When Joe went with Count Basie… This ties up a great deal with what I was saying about Jug and the Blues, and so forth. When he went with Basie, all of a sudden I was hearing this reputation coming back. I would hear it from disk jockeys, establishment disk jockeys; I presume critics wrote it up that way; “The greatest Blues singer in the world.” So when I think about Blues singers, I think about Blues singers. Joe Williams, as far as Jazz is concerned, singing, I guess he’d have to be the greatest Blues singer, because that’s all they knew about him from Basie.

But the thing about Joe, the reason why I’m annoyed by it… The first time I had the pleasure of having an exchange with Joe… A singer named Joe Evans called me to accompany him on a gig in a little after-hours spot in Chicago. I had never been there before, I had never seen it — I didn’t know the place existed. Sometimes you think you know all about your environment, you think you know where everything is, you think you’re pretty hip. Okay, I go down to this club and go in there… Remember, I don’t know this place exists. Who’s there? Joe Williams, Duke Ellington, Al Hibbler, Dinah Washington was there, another famous singer in Chicago whose name was Lillian Hunter, and a few other people that I can’t think of.

Okay. They asked Joe to sing a song with me, put me right on the spot. He says, “Look, can you play Pagliacci for me?” Well, the famous…the part of Pagliacci that everybody would know, the part that was written for Puccini, it was written for a tenor. Okay, he adapted to it, because he has a bass voice. And he gave it beautifully! He scared me death!

And I hate the thought of anybody thinking of him as a Blues singer. He’s just a wonderful singer. And as a ballad singer, he has no peer. I picked this particular track to give you an example of what he can sing like without a large orchestra. “Young and Foolish,” I think it is.

[MUSIC: Joe Williams, “Young and Foolish.”

TP: We’ll hear next some music by Von Freeman, another person Chris was associated with for quite some time.

CA: Mmm-hmm. I probably worked longer with Von than… Probably! I know I worked longer with him than anybody I have ever worked with. I spent five years in and out of his bands.

TP: Tell us about the band.

CA: Well, the band consisted of Von, his two brothers George and Bruz… George is a guitarist. In fact, he’s the guitarist on that album with Bird you played. Bruz Freeman was a drummer. And we worked at different clubs around Chicago, and went on short tours to nearby states, and so forth, maybe for one-nighters.

TP: What was the repertoire of the band? What sorts of things did you play?

CA: Back then we played practically all standard tunes, some things that were written, new lines to old chord progressions, things like that — but pretty standard. All the new Bebop tunes weren’t on the scene yet. See, we’re talking Forties. We’re talking ’47, ’48 and ’49…’51.

TP: Can you talk about what Von’s sound was like in the late 1940’s?

CA: His sound was very much like Ben Webster’s. You could always hear the air coming the side of it. You could always hear that. That’s one description. It was pre-Bebop. It fit Bebop, but… It fit then and it fit now. It fit Bebop the same way Don Byas or Paul Gonsalves would fit Bebop, so correct and so right. So when Bebop came in, all he had to do was alter a few lines; he’d do that, too. The basis for it was there already. Or he doesn’t have to do that. Because if he’d deal with Bebop and think of it as such, he’d wind up playing certain cliches and lines, and it’s hard to get out of it sometimes. It’s not really thinking; it’s doing what you hear, and what you hear is quite often what you’ve heard somebody else play, not something that you’ve put together. You may think you’re putting it together; I guess you could say you are.

But Von wasn’t just a wonderful instrumentalist, he was a wonderful musician. He knew a lot! He could sit down at the piano and play things, so I knew he knew about harmony.

If I go on about him, it’s because we have a mutual admiration society going for sure.

TP: I know that, because Von has said about you that you have the greatest harmonic ear he’s ever heard.

TP: Chris says that Von has been playing “White Sands” since 1946 or 1947.

CA: Yeah, that’s true. As I said before, back in those days they were just really starting to write new melodies to old changes. Well, that’s not true either, I guess, because they were already doing that to “I Got Rhythm” and writing different melodies to Blues. But they hadn’t extended out much further than that. They hadn’t taken too many standard songs with a lot of changes and so forth, and redoing them. At least not in Chicago. Chicago’s another place…

TP: Well, how about the younger breed? How about someone like Henry Prior, a young alto player in Chicago, who passed away too young, but…

CA: Now, see, I was talking about Henry Prior being one of the… I remember I told you that most of the people had to wait for Bird to make the next record, because they didn’t know what to do. And I was saying that Henry Prior was one of the few…one of the people that had the light. But I forgot to add, he was from New York! He brought the message from New York. He was not born in Chicago. He moved to Chicago. He knew what it was all about, as far as Bebop was concerned, the technical aspect of it. He just died too soon. He died too soon.

TP: That’s the case for a lot of musicians of that generation. There were a lot of perils involved, and it was not the safest time for a lot of people.

CA: No, it wasn’t.
TP: But the people who survived came out very, very strong.

CA: A friend of mine gave a birthday party for me a couple of years ago. His toast was, “We’re celebrating Chris just because he’s still here.”

TP: [ETC.] We’ll hear now “Two Bass Hit” by Dizzy Gillespie’s Big Band. I know Chris has some things to say about it.

CA: I certainly do. When Dizzy had his big band, it was the first time I really… For bass players… This was before I met Wilbur Ware. But in the earlier years, the great bass players were Oscar Pettiford, Jimmy Blanton and so forth. But this is for their solo work, keeping in mind the technique of recording back in those days was not too good, and the music was such that…the music the bass players played as a background, playing behind people, you didn’t hear very well, and there wasn’t much to be said for it, I assume. But when music changed…

Well, the short of it (never mind the lecture), when I first heard Ray Brown, it hit me… I even remember the thought that I had. I had this thought three times in my life — “that’s how bass should be played.” And it just fit so well with the band. I’m not talking about his solo work. That’s phenomenal. I’m talking about just the way he sounded with the band. It just threw me completely.

And Dizzy… I never had the pleasure of playing with Dizzy, doggone it, but you know what he is to music. I keep thinking what makes Dizzy so different than the rest of the trumpet players — the fact that he’s such a great musician, or is it his personality, or what it is. And it hit me. He has music down… I heard him in an interview where he was explaining about him and Bird. The interviewer was trying to put Dizzy up as having a great personality as such, a good style. He explained that Bird was the one that had the style. What Dizzy, in all his humility, would not say (you don’t say this about yourself) the fact that he could arrange, he could write — he brought the music to everybody. In his first band, he used to teach everybody what everything was about. The trumpet players, the arrangers, so they would know what it was all about.

All the great trumpet players, coming down from Fats Navarro, Dizzy, Clifford Brown, Freddie Hubbard, Wynton Marsalis, they have to take the music so serious, they all had something to prove, being the greatest. It’s quite a thing when you don’t write and can’t see the whole picture. And I had never heard any of them once… Dizzy is the only one I ever heard approach music with a sense of humor, and it’s no joke. He can have fun with the music. It’s so right, he can do anything with it. He will always be the boss.

And this record here was one of the first records that I ever heard that really impressed me. I am putting that wrong; they all impressed me. But this is the first record that I was really impressed by. Just his writing and Ray Brown’s playing, it pinned it down for me.

[MUSIC: “Two Bass Hit,” Griff, W. Ware, “Woody ‘n You”]

TP: Listening to Johnny Griffin and Wilbur Ware brings up a host of memories for Chris Anderson, who played with both of them pretty extensively.

CA: Yes. That’s asking me to tell you about a lifetime. Listening to Wilbur… Wilbur was not only a great bass player, he was good with people. He was good with kids, he was good… Everybody loved him. He had a laugh that you’d never forget. And don’t let him get to know you well, know your weak spots, he will get to you one way or another.

I remember an incident, he was working down at Pee-Wee’s, at a place on 11th Street, a club. The owner used to be the emcee at Birdland for a long time. Keep in mind, any family where you deal with each other all the time… I say “family” because that’s what we were. So we were making a fuss about something. I remember a time when I had a grievance against Wilbur, real or imagined. It wasn’t much. To show you how little it was, I went down to the club to hear him, which I don’t do that often. I decided, “Okay, I’m not going to even talk to him. I’ll ignore him. I’ll talk to everybody else.” He yelled at me, “Hi, Chris! Hey, Chris!” I wouldn’t say anything to him.

The bandstand was about three feet off the floor, so he was up there. He said, “So you’re ignoring me. Okay.” And after a while he called me again; I wouldn’t say nothing to him. He was coming at me from the other direction. So what he did, he took the bass and put it on the floor. And the bandstand maybe was 7 or 8 feet from the tables where I was. And he put that bass… All that music went out of the bass down through the peg, across the floor, through my shoes, up my legs, and through my body… Maybe I could tune out my ears if I wanted to, but… That’s the wonderful thing about acoustic bass. When it was played right, it felt right, and you could not ignore it. I must have looked up and said, “All right, I give.” I said, “I got it! I got it!”

TP: Wilbur Ware had one of the most distinctive sounds of any bass player around, I think.

CA: Yes, indeed.

TP: Again, this may be an impossible recollection, but do you recall the circumstances of first meeting Wilbur?

CA: There’s something I was telling you in my interview, Leo Blevins telling me… There was this place in Chicago called the Hole, where all the Jazz musicians would meet…

TP: Where was it?

CA: 29th and Indiana. And Leo was telling me about this great bass player, Wilbur Ware, that was coming to town, and he wanted me to hear him. Leo turned me on to everybody I ever met, and also was responsible in some way… I mean, he introduced me to somebody that introduced me to, at least! He was only twice removed from me meeting them, at least — not directly responsible.

Wilbur was in Milwaukee. He was in Milwaukee with Sonny Stitt. And when Wilbur came back, Wilbur and Sonny Stitt came to town for the first time, too, and lived there. I didn’t remember that before when we were talking about it. So I got to meet Sonny Stitt at this time. Wilbur lived in Chicago, of course; he was just out on the road. And when they came back, Sonny resided there. This would have to be ’47, ’46 or ’47. Let’s say ’47.

TP: You mentioned in the interview also a time with a Rhythm-and-Blues singer who liked to go to the bar and hear the rhythm section.

CA: Cozy Eccleston, yes.

TP: Would you do a lot of those type of gigs, not just Jazz, but Rhythm-and-Blues singers and Bluesmen and so forth? Or was it never the twain shall meet? What was the environment for you as a working pianist in Chicago?

CA: Listen. Remember, I was saying a while ago, musicians, they worked a weird assortment of gigs. You’d never know what was… The same thing I was telling you about Ike Day. He had this gig playing drums, no band, no nothing. Well, musicians, whatever there was to do or play, they did it. And Wilbur could play drums, he was a dancer, he was a drummer. He learned the entertainment business. He just happened to be a great bassist, that’s all. He played rhythm-and-blues gigs, he played Blues gigs, Blues gigs, b-l-u-u-z-s gigs. He played for singers, he played some… Everything that could be played, he played it. And to think someone like him graduated from a tub, a stick and a rope. That’s what he learned on.
TP: His foster father built him a homemade bass, I believe. Isn’t that right.

CA: Yes. That’s what we’re talking about.

TP: The Reverend Turner.

CA: I don’t remember… Yes, wait a minute. Yes, I do. I only got to know about him shortly before Wilbur died. We were talking about it, but I’d forgotten about that.

TP: The music we’ll hear next features Wilbur Ware in company with another tenor player who spent not that much time in Chicago, but the time he spent there seems to have been quite significant for him, Sonny Rollins.

CA: Yes, he was there a couple of years, I think.

TP: I think it was late 1950, early ’51, and then 1954-55.

CA: I think it was ’54 or ’55. Because he had a gig at the Beehive in Chicago. That was his last gig, then he left and came back to New York.

TP: I also read that he was there in 1950-51, and he played with Ike Day and jammed with Johnny Griffin and so forth.

CA: Oh yes.

TP: Anyway, what do you remember about Sonny Rollins in Chicago at that time? Anything in particular?

CA: He was warm. He was a wonderful musician. And being who he was, he helped the musicians out to learn. But he worked all the same kind of gigs that we worked. He worked gigs that you wouldn’t believe he’d be on, for his stature. But he was in the salt mines. He worked the Blues gigs, rhythm-and-blues gigs… There was even a place… There was a place outside Chicago called Calumet City that had a bunch of strip joints. We worked those even; we had to. He worked them, too.

TP: So Sonny really blended into the scene, and became part of the community.

CA: Exactly. It had to do with doing what you had to do. That’s a fact.

[MUSIC: S. Rollins, Wilbur Ware, Elvin Jones: “Softly As In A Morning Sunrise” and “All The Things You Are”]

Incidentally, that’s the second time I had the thought that that’s how bass should be played. Whoo!

TP: Wilbur Ware is such a heavy figure to talk about, we forgot to discuss Johnny Griffin, whose playing we mentioned before.

CA: I don’t know how I could forget to talk about Johnny Griffin, because he was responsible for me getting to record, too, as well as having many other jobs in Chicago, and a lot of things. I haven’t had a chance to see him much since I’ve been in New York. In fact, I’ve only seen him twice since I came to New York in ’61. But he wasn’t in town a lot…

TP: He lived in Europe, and didn’t come here for more than a decade.

CA: Yes. In fact, I think it was about ’79 or so, he did a concert at Carnegie Hall. I remember Wilbur and his wife Gloria went, and Wilbur was so debilitated at the time, he had to go up in a wheelchair. It was so difficult; I remember that. And I think I was ill or something; I didn’t get to go to that performance. So I didn’t get to see him then. And he was at the Grant Park once, and we were supposed to go…

TP: Grant Park in Chicago?

CA: No, not Grant Park. I mean, Grant’s Tomb in New York. He was finished playing, and I got to see him just for a second.

TP: I guess I keep asking you the same tired question…

CA: That’s because I don’t answer it.

TP: No, I’ll ask you one more time, as I have for various other musicians we’ve played, what were the circumstances by which you first met Johnny Griffin in Chicago?

CA: I don’t remember. It’s just like I’ve always known him. I can’t remember my first meeting with him. For the life of me, I’ve tried. Because you asked me in that interview, and I haven’t been able to come up with any more. It’s like Jug.

TP: What do you remember about playing with him?

CA: Oh, that I enjoyed it. It was fun. I can’t remember any particular incident that stands out.

TP: Did you ever hear Griff play alto sax? He started off as an alto player.

CA: I don’t remember… Yes, I did see him play the alto. There was a club called Swingland; there used to be a Cotton Club in Chicago, and they changed it to Swingland. Now, that was during the late Fifties. Now and then he would switch to alto.

[ETC.]

[MUSIC: Sonny Stitt, “Casbah,” “Idaho”]

TP: Did you play with Sonny Stitt on sessions?

CA: Yes, I played with Stitt, I worked with him… The first time I played with Sonny Stitt was Easter of 1947. We were supposed to work a gig at the Pershing Ballroom with Bird, the first time I worked with Bird. Sonny Stitt was supposed to be on that gig, but he got sick, and we worked some gigs…

Sonny Stitt by then was part of the local crowd, the same way we talked about Sonny Rollins. Sonny Stitt was in that same situation.

TP: In ’47, ’48, ’49?

CA: Yes. I worked a lot with him. I worked as much as any other piano players with him. I could say I worked a lot, as much as there were gigs.

TP: What was a standard set by Stitt like? A lot of standards, substitutions, Bop tunes?

CA: Well, there were a few originals, like “Ray’s Idea” that was coming on the scene, some things written on Blues and some things written on “Rhythm.” But there were not a lot of complete originals, with completely different chord changes yet. So they played things like “Idaho.” This is one they played back then. I haven’t heard anyone play this tune in maybe over twenty years now. They don’t play it any more. Things like “Fine and Dandy” and “The Way You Look Tonight,” those were the standards that they used in those days?

TP: Was he playing any alto at that time, or was it exclusively tenor in the late Forties?

CA: Oh, no. He played alto a lot. In fact, he played alto mostly. It would depend on which one he wanted to play, which was most convenient for him to play at the time. He had horns in different places. He might have used an alto last night, and it might have been too inconvenient for him, or he’d forget the tenor so he played alto — or vice-versa. Rarely did he switch.

TP: He was also playing baritone at the time in Gene Ammons’ band and other situations, I recall.

CA: Yeah, for recordings. But generally speaking, he didn’t do it too much.

TP: Do you have a preference for his alto or tenor? Or is that not a fair question?

CA: It’s a fair question. I prefer him on tenor. This medium, Bebop, to my ears, fits the tenor better. The only people that I ever heard fill up an alto, I mean sound-wise, were Bird and Cannonball. And alto players, despite their technical achievements out of the horns, I get a picture of a little-bitty horn when you play alto. But the tenor, it fits the medium a lot better with the things that they play on it. Most people, if they get a real big sound, it sounds like the sound is bigger than the horn to me. It seems to me like Bebop was made more for a tenor. It takes a special person to play it easily and get a big sound on alto. That’s just my opinion, that’s all.

TP: [ETC., STATION ID]

CA: I would like to put in a disclaimer here, so that I don’t get shot. Now, I know quite a few alto players still. Some of my best friends play alto, and they play it well and they do the job.

TP: There’s a wonderful record you’re on by Frank Strozier, for instance.

TP: And many others, and I’m sure they all know who they are if they’re out there. No offense intended.

CA: But they are the exceptions. That’s my feeling. More tenor players are going to sound good playing Bebop than alto players. That’s what I think I’m saying.

TP: [ETC.] A lot of what Sun Ra was doing in Chicago in the late Forties and Fifties is obscure, but I know he had a rehearsal band in the late Forties and early Fifties, and he was doing arrangements at the Club De Lisa, I think, and in the rehearsal band were people like Von Freeman, Red Holloway, Wilbur Ware… What do you remember about Sun Ra at the time?

CA: You see, before he got into this experimental music, doing things, Sun Ra was an arranger for the De Lisa Club band. This was a big show club, they had dancers…

TP: Red Saunders’ band was there.

CA: Red Saunders’ band, exactly. And he did his arranging with that band. But he did not have his rehearsals and stuff over there, to my knowledge. He rehearsed down in Budland, in the Pershing Hotel, where the Pershing Lounge was. That’s where they had the rehearsals.

TP: Do you happen to recall any of those rehearsals, what was happening in them?

CA: Well, first, to show you how experimental and how out he could write, one day I was talking to him on the telephone, and he played a tape of something. It was called “The Devil Dance.” And it scared me over the telephone! It really did. I had never heard anything like this in my life. But as far as his big band, it was quite a band; in fact, everybody would be in it at one time or another. Wilbur Ware and Victor Sproles would be in it, for bass players — I think even Israel Crosby did it for a minute.

TP: Von Freeman said that having played with Sun Ra made it possible for him to play any type of music anywhere. He wouldn’t be daunted by anything!

CA: Yes, that would do it! That would do it. We had the most wonderful exchanges, because we were into different kinds of music. And he’d have these rehearsals, performance rehearsals on Sunday afternoon. At this particular time, I was living in the Pershing Hotel. I came in one day, and he turned around and said to me… Because he’d been asking me to come down, but I’d never managed to get down there, because I was doing something, or not doing, or too lazy to come down. And he turned around, and he said… Everybody was looking at me. He said, “Well, you finally decided to come down, huh?” I tried to think of something to say: “Yeah. Well, I heard you were going to walk the water today; I thought I’d have to come down and see this.”

But he could really write. And one of the wonderful things about him, he took some musicians who couldn’t read too good, and taught them how to read, and made them stand up and be men. And he had a lot of these people in his bands for years. So he’s contributed a lot to the music.

TP: Some for thirty years, and the band is still going strong, except for Count Basie and Mercer Ellington, I suppose.

CA: That got to be quite an organization. Because even now, they… They all stay together. They’re a very close-knit group. He owns a big house up in Philadelphia, and most of the band members live there. So he has a way of keeping a band together. And that’s what you must do if you’re going to have any longevity as a bandleader. Because things aren’t going good all the time. Because he kept the band together, but that doesn’t mean that they worked all the time in this country. Sometimes they go to Europe, sometimes… They’ll work anywhere. But he still manages to keep them together. Keeping a band together, it gives the implication that they worked all the time and they worked regularly. This is not the case. He had other things going for him, and he found a way to keep his band together.

TP: And I hear that band rehearses like crazy. They rehearse all day long, every day to keep that discipline going.

CA: Yeah! Not only did it keep the discipline going, it kept a lot of people out of trouble, which was very important during those early days. That’s very important.

TP: “Young and Foolish,” as the song goes.

CA: Yes. What in the world were we thinking of?

TP: [ETC.] …Barry Harris’s record For The Moment, on Uptown Records, recorded live at the Jazz Cultural Theatre.

CA: Let me say one thing about this album. I didn’t know Barry had made this album, but I knew he’d made a lot of live albums. So I heard a cut one day on the radio, and something told me… I was listening to the cloud sounds, and something told me this was made at the Jazz Cultural Theatre. I don’t know whether it was wishful thinking or what it was. But when it turned out that it was, I was shocked. I have quite a thing about ESP and the supernatural and stuff like that. Anyway, it really surprised me. Maybe I think everything’s at the Cultural Theatre, because that’s been a home for me. It’s a place where I’ve been able to hold forth, thanks to Barry and… Well, I’m not going to talk much more about this, but…

TP: The piece we’ll hear is “To Monk With Love.” Barry Harris spent much time with Monk in the last years of Monk’s life, and absorbed a great deal, after having absorbed the vocabulary of Bud Powell. [ETC.]

CA: Barry Harris is so wonderful. He’s a great player, he’s a great arranger, and talking about good with people… He’s a wonderful teacher. He had these classes that they started at the Jazz Forum. And putting this thing together was something amazing to watch. There were days when we didn’t think it would work, human beings being what they are. The choir consisted of professionals, semi-professionals and so on, all the musicians were professionals. I had done some Symphony Space concerts with Barry before, but doing something in Town Hall was something special to us. And the feeling about the whole thing, it was amazing.

One of the reasons I wanted to play this, forgive me, this was one of the greatest nights of my life, bar none — and I have Barry Harris to thank for it. And I want him to hear it publicly. I’m always thanking him, but it will never be enough.

TP: [ETC.] The next two selections will focus on two tenor players who are very important to Chris, George Coleman and Clifford Jordan. Both LPs feature Billy Higgins on drums, and he’s a close friend of Chris.

CA: He certainly is. He’s one of my very closest friends. I remember asking him one day, “How many records have you made?” He made an attempt to answer, and he scratched his head, and he said, “This is ridiculous. I don’t know!” He didn’t have the faintest idea he’s made so many, because he’s recorded with so many people. But in the 1970’s he’s been the main man in Cedar Walton’s trios and quartets and quintets and so forth, but he has recorded and played with other people. He is just the greatest drummer… He has so much taste. He’s the personification of taste. There’s not enough I can tell you about Billy Higgins. And as a person… He’s the kind of person you go up to Grant’s Tomb, and people from all over show up from different facets of his life. He’s another one of those people that just attracts people.

George Coleman? Now, he’s one of the greatest phenomenons I’ve ever seen in my life on the saxophone. I met him when he came to Chicago from Memphis, him and Booker Little and Frank Strozier — two of them came together and one came later. I don’t remember how it was. I think Booker Little and Frank might have come first, and then George (I’m not sure) shortly behind. It was a case of saying, “You go ahead; I’ll be right behind you,” I’m sure.

But George, the first gig we had the Roosevelt College in Chicago, I remember thinking, “This man is going to go somewhere; he’s really going to go somewhere.” And he has so much talent. Sometimes I think one of the only things that may have slowed him up when he was getting off the ground… He has such phenomenal technique, I’ve had people tell me… You know, he practiced a lot. Like, Sonny Stitt in his early years was a practicer. Every time you’d see him, he had his horn in his hand. He didn’t have a natural talent for technique; he acquired it. But George seems to have this natural technique, and understanding of harmony and the melodic line. He understands it all. And he’s become a great arranger. He’s a complete musician. He’s just not a saxophone player. He’s just one of the most phenomenal men I’ve ever met. And he stands tall, he knows how to take care of business. He’s what he is. He’s always been the same.

And he’ll be standing tall fifty years from now. He’s the kind of musician (which is unusual for a musician), he gets up and runs in the morning. He gets up at five o’clock. He’s always been like this. So you got a health nut that’s a great artist, too! So he can sustain himself. He got involved in circular breathing along the way. So he had to keep himself in good shape.

TP: Chris, you say Bill Lee is the third man who makes you think “That’s the way the bass should be played.”

CA: Yes. And I said a lot more, because he got to be quite a part of my life. All the great people that you know that play, there’s somebody you identify with more than others. It has nothing to do with greatness. See, he got to be a part of me. I know what he’s about and he knows what I’m about. I have to say he’s my favorite bass player in the world. He has some albums out on Strata-East, big band things. He’s a great arranger. He’s just a great musician. Poet… He does everything. I could be talking all night about him, so we’ll have to skip that.

TP: Clifford Jordan you’ve played with quite a bit.

CA: Yes, quite a bit. Cliff Jordan lived in Chicago, too, but I didn’t get to know him really until I got to New York. I got to know him starting in the Seventies, and played with him a lot. I’ve used up all the superlatives on George Coleman, but they apply to Clifford Jordan just as well, just as evenly.

TP: One of the most distinctive sounds in all of Jazz.

CA: He doesn’t just play Bebop. He doesn’t play cliches. He plays. I’m proud to know him. I can’t say much more than that.

TP: [ETC.] We’ll close the show with someone who comes from a similar line to Chris Anderson, but took the music in a different direction in Chicago, and was responsible for fostering a whole school of creative music, improvised music, Jazz if you will, in Chicago in the 1960’s. I’m speaking of Muhal Richard Abrams.

CA: He taught musicians how to write their own music, arrange, arrange their own concerts, take care of their business. He made complete musicians out of men. He brought about a new breed of musician. He really did. That’s what this generation is about.

David Murray turned 57 a few days ago; he’ll be in NYC next week to present his latest project, a big band collaboration with guitarist James “Blood” Ulmer, a partner on various projects over the last 35 years. I’ve appended a feature piece that I wrote about Murray in 2008 for Jazziz, framed around the release of Banished, and also a Blindfold Test from the early ’00s.

* * *
“I’ve always been around poets,” said David Murray, in New York City in January to play the Knitting Factory with his quartet. “They bare their soul so much. When I get my hands on a good poem, I can see the music jumping off the page. The word is powerful.”

Recently arrived from his home in Paris, Murray was having a pre-gig dinner at Chez Josephine. The walls of the West 42nd Street bistro are festooned with photographs and memorabilia of Josephine Baker, the famous African-American dancer-chanteuse out of St. Louis, who sailed to Paris in 1925, at 18, and transformed herself into a staple of French popular culture. After the second world war, she adopted a dozen impoverished French orphans, one of them the proprietor, who reinforces a tone of soulful Francophilia, both with the menu — fried chicken and collard greens share pride of place with snails and bouillabaisse — and the entertainment, provided by an elderly black woman in her Sunday best singing to her own piano accompaniment and a woman of similar vintage blowing melodies and obbligatos on trumpet.

Murray and his pianist, Lafayette Gilchrist, sat near the piano, facing Valerie Malot, Murray’s wife and manager, and Jim West, who runs Justin Time Records, which recently issued Sacred Ground, Murray’s 10th release for the label. On Sacred Ground, Murray and his Black Saint Quartet stretch out on seven songs — on two, Cassandra Wilson sings lyrics by Ishmael Reed — that the leader wrote for the soundtrack of Banished. The PBS documentary film, which premiered in February, examines three towns in Georgia, Missouri, and Arkansas from which residents of African descent were forceably removed during the years after Reconstruction, and which remain lily-white today.

Banished is the most recently realized of an ambitious series of projects, all touching on Afro-diasporic themes, that Murray, 52, launched after he migrated from New York City to the City of Light in 1996 to join Malot, with whom he has two children. It follows Pushkin, a fully-staged quasi-opera, as yet unrecorded, on which Murray wrote a suite of songs to French, English, Creole, and Bantu translations of texts by the immortal Russian poet, himself the great-grandson of an Ethiopian prince. During his dozen years of self-imposed exile, Murray, among other things, has composed big band and string music for Cuban ensembles, and created repertoire for bands comprised of musicians from Guadeloupe (Creole, Yonn-de, and Gwotet, Senegal (Fo Deuk Revue), and the Black American Church (Speaking in Tongues). Later that evening at the Knitting Factory, he intended to touch base with poet Amiri Baraka, the librettist of “Sisyphus Syndrome,” scheduled to open on May 19th, Malcolm X’s birthday, for which Murray had as yet completed only five of 15 songs. In two days, he would fly to Cuba, to audition a string ensemble to perform as-yet-to-be written arrangements for a proposed celebration of Nat “King” Cole with Cassandra Wilson.

After ordering the fried chicken, Murray took his glass of vin rouge to a quieter spot at the front of the bar. “Next week I’m going to be writing like crazy,” he said. “But the deadlines keep me motivated. It’s like Duke Ellington said, ‘If I want to get something finished, all I need is a deadline.’ But between Banished and Sisyphus, I have music to play with my quartet for the next two years.”

In the summer of 2006, Banished director Marco Williams, a Murray fan since the saxophonist’s New York glory days in the ’80s, contacted Malot about Murray’s availability and sent a two-hour rough cut to Paris. “He wasn’t quite sure if he wanted to use me, but I forced myself upon him,” Murray said. “I stopped everything else I was doing, didn’t wait for nobody to give me no money, started writing songs, and had Valerie tape them and send them to him over the Internet.”

“It was a challenging process,” Williams relates. “David is not someone who’s going to write notes that hit a certain cut. Frankly, I couldn’t tell whether the music was going to work or not. But I wanted a collaborator, not someone just to score the film. And it was completely evident that David got the movie, it meant something to him, and he wanted to express something. The music was so beautiful, so evocative. I told my editors, ‘We’ll just get all the stems, and cut down as needed.’”

“Basically, this is ethnic cleansing,” Murray elaborated. “You see that monster, you got to cut the head off. My way of trying to cut the head off was to send him tunes.”

Without much prodding, Murray revealed that the film’s particulars resonated with his own family’s experience.

“Most black people who know their family history talk about how they got ran off,” he said. “We don’t know the terms ‘banished’ or ‘ethnic cleansing.’ We say, ‘We got ran off.’ When a town decides it don’t need you no more, that’s just how it is.” Murray cited his maternal grandfather, George Hackett, a sharecropper who went to Midland, Texas, and struck oil. “They ran him off the property, but he managed to sell his oil rights, and moved to California,” he said. “He was very enterprising. He went north to the Bay Area, but that was too far. A black man at that time couldn’t do nothing with the sea. Then he remembered he’d seen cotton in Fresno. He knew cotton, so he turned around to go where the produce was. He bought a block in Fresno, called Hackett Flats. It still has that name, and I own property on that plot.”

By Murray’s account, his paternal grandfather, a Nebraskan, was less fortunate, leaving his wife six months pregnant with Murray’s father when he fell from a scaffold in a gusting wind. Born in 1925 and full-grown in 1940, David Murray, Sr. hopped a train from Nebraska to Los Angeles, started a body and fender shop near Central Avenue, sent for his mother and older brother, and at 17, lied about his age and joined the Navy. Decommissioned in 1946, he moved to the Bay Area, tried out for the San Francisco 49ers, even joined the circus as an acrobat, but then returned to body-and-fender work, raised his family, and played guitar at church in a band with his wife, sons, and two nephews. Murray played bongos, but for one evening’s gathering, having just received an alto saxophone from his junior high school band director, Phil Hardiman, he brought his new possession.

“I didn’t know jack-shit, just squeaked and squawked,” he says. “I probably sounded a little like I do now, but now I actually know what I’m doing. It was like, ‘Wow, that young Murray is exuberant. He’s got a lot of energy.’ Then a couple of weeks later, ‘He’s starting to learn the songs now. Oh, yeah!’ I knew the melodies because my mother was always playing them. You can say that I am an on-the-job training type of guy.”

Physically mature like his father during high school, Murray, who ran a 4.3 40-yard dash, starred as a football tailback, got good grades, and earned money playing music. “I was always a leader,” he said. “From 13, I was bringing money home to give to my dad. We won a youth contest to play all the Shakey’s pizza parlors in the Bay Area. We had a gig every weekend for three years. We’d do any song, like ‘A Taste of Honey,’ and I’d improvise, not even knowing that I was playing jazz. Then I began to learn it. I’d heard Sonny Rollins play a solo saxophone concert at the Greek Theater, and he was a mighty influence. That’s when I started playing tenor. Later I had a funk group called the Notations of Soul, one of the tight bands in town. We played all the dances and proms. We played a lot of James Brown, of course. They started calling me ‘Murray-O,’ after Maceo Parker.”

During Murray’s teens, post-bop titans like Joe Henderson and Woody Shaw settled in the Bay Area, but Murray — who was slowing down Coleman Hawkins LPs to 16 r.p.m to analyze his solos — opted for the freedom principle, particularly the high-intensity post-Coltrane direction emblemized by Albert Ayler, himself a son of the sanctified church with early R&B experience. On a tip from trombonist Ray Anderson, whom he met during a successful audition for a horn section, Murray matriculated at the University of California-Claremont, and spent the next few years refining his craft with the likes of Arthur Blythe, Bobby Bradford, John Carter, and Butch Morris, all regulars at informal sessions at the house of Stanley Crouch, then a playwright, poet, and professor on the Claremont faculty, and a drummer under the sway of Sunny Murray.

In 1975, Murray moved to New York City, sharing a loft with Crouch over the Tin Palace, an ultra-hip bar on the Bowery.

“All my Dad said was, ‘Just go out there and make some money — you’ll get good,’” Murray said. He followed that advice, performing as a peer of such A-list outcat elders as Sunny Murray, Don Pullen, and Lester Bowie, as well as Julius Hemphill, Oliver Lake, and Hamiett Bluiett, his future partners in the World Saxophone Quartet. In 1979, he assembled an octet, hiring the likes of Olu Dara, Anthony Davis, George Lewis, and Henry Threadgill. As the ’80s progressed he gigged frequently with two quartets, one a boisterous harmolodic unit with Blood Ulmer, the other a quartet with hardcore jazz masters like pianist John Hicks, bassists Fred Hopkins and Ray Drummond, and the iconic drummers Edward Blackwell and Andrew Cyrille. He also led ad hoc encounters with Randy Weston, Jack DeJohnette, and Milford Graves, and conceived elaborate homages to such heroes as Hawkins and Paul Gonsalves.

“I figured out that I could actually call the best musicians in the world and they’d show up, that I’d have one of the best bands just by hiring the best rhythm sections,” Murray said. “They taught me how to play. But I became a man in the World Saxophone Quartet. I’d be saying too much about myself if I said I was their equal when we began. But after five years, my sound started getting bigger. Finally, I became their contemporary — and they let me know it.”

Murray attracted a worldwide fan base through the lyric swagger and raw edge of his tonal personality. He drew criticism from many ’80s “young lions,” who attacked him as a poseur, suggesting that his predisposition to blast off to the outer partials stemmed less from an independent aesthetic decision than insufficient grounding in the tropes of tradition. As Crouch, who had championed Murray during the ’70s, joined forces with Wynton Marsalis to establish the Jazz at Lincoln Center juggernaut, Murray was unceremoniously deleted from the mainstream conversation. He recorded ever more prolifically, for multiple labels, and toured regularly with his various ensembles, but he was falling into a rut, and his rambunctious lifestyle was beginning to take a toll.

“I was troubled, and I needed to leave,” Murray recalls. “I had Paris in my sights.” For one thing, Paris was a magnet for African musicians. For another, Malot, who grew up in North Africa and whose sister’s husband, Klod Klavue, is a master Gwo-Ka drummer from Guadeloupe, understood — and through her booking and production experience was in a position to actualize — Murray’s desire “to get closer to my African roots and do a little personal research” on them by traveling to and performing with “groups of people in Senegal, in Ghana, in South Africa, in Cuba I’d met that I could relate to.”

“Jazz has the primal feeling of African drums and the sophistication of the city,” Murray says. “A primal force, like [drummer] Dudu Ndiaye Rose, brings very complex rhythms. I bring the harmonies and melodies. It makes me want to play and sweat, like praising the Lord, going into a trance and getting back to roots. I’m trying to get to the core where the musics fuse.”

Today, Murray is less enamored with Paris than he once was. (“[The French] have an attitude that gets on your nerves.”) Nonetheless, Murray finds family life a sanctuary that provides space to think and focus, to work more systematically than the distractions of the New York City allowed.

“I used to put out five albums a year; now I put one out every year or 18 months,” he says. “I worked all the time and took pretty much any gig; now I take select gigs, maybe 120 concerts a year. I’m in Paris half the time, moving around the other half. I’m not aligning myself with the avant-garde or the bebop, I’m just David Murray. I take my kids to school at 8:30, then I exercise, and I’m home at 9:30. I write until noon, and practice the rest of the day till 6, going through my books, trying to keep my chops up and my mind open. When a project comes up, I get very serious, and don’t study nobody else’s shit but mine. That will last for three months, and then there’s no project. Then I go back to my little everyday shit.”

He’s restless, though, and perhaps another journey is imminent.“One year I’m going to take my saxophone and go around the world myself,” he said. “I’ve got to do it soon, before I’m 55. What kind of music do people make in Tibet? What are people doing in India? I want to play with them.”

That’s Mingus. “Better Get It In Your Soul.” I just love… I heard this on the radio in Paris the other day. We were in a car. Everybody said, “Who’s that guy back there?” I said, “That’s Mingus. He’s pushing the band on.” He’s saying all kind of stuff. We need people like this guy. We need more people like him. Is the trumpet player Lonnie Hillyer? [It’s not Lonnie Hillyer.] Who’s that bald-headed guy, that trumpet player? [Ted Curson.] That’s Ted! I could be wrong, but I get the Clifford Jordan vibe from the tenor player. [No.] So it’s Ted Curson, Eric and…goddamn, who is it? [Well, how did you like the saxophone player?] I loved him. It wasn’t a long solo. He was kind of breaking up there at the top, but I liked him. And definitely it’s before the period when George came into the band. It couldn’t have been him. I’m trying to think of who was in that band, because I’ve never seen that band… [Should I tell you?] No, not yet. Because I might come up with it. [How would you describe his sound?] What’s the characteristic of his sound? [Warm. A little brittle at the top. [Do you get a sense of where he’s from? Could you locate him geographically by his sound?] Texas. [You got it.] Texas. I’m just trying to think who the heck it is. What’s that tenor player…Red Conner? [No. But this guy was under Red Conner.] Under Red Conner. [He heard that when he was young. People say he sounded very close to Red Conner.] That’s a very good hint. Under Red Conner. And this guy is still around. [No, he died.] Oh, boy. Texas. Who’s from Texas. He sounds like a few different people to me. That’s why I thought it might have been Clifford, because of the way he started that solo. Because Clifford always had that restraint, then you’d wait for him to bust it, then he finally busts it at the end. To me, that’s Clifford. When I was playing with the Mingus All Star Big Band on that record we did in Paris, I was sitting between Clifford and…who’s that alto player, that guy who’s riding on the horse… He did like one of them slick tunes. I can’t remember his name. He teaches at University of San Francisco. [Not John Handy.] Handy. I was sitting between Clifford and Handy. Damn, this guy is dead, huh? [For many years.] From Texas. The only guy he sounds like to me… [AFTER] Goddammit. I love Booker. Man, I love him. I should have got that. {How about the Mingus band? Did it have an impact on you?] I heard that a lot. In fact, that… [Your octet reminds me of that sort of feeling.] Sure, of course. Because I love Mingus’ music. My son is named Mingus! That kind of explains things, too. Just having those three horns or however many horns he’s got, and me having five horns, you get a balance… You could go many ways, especially if you have at least five horns up there. It could go so many different ways. Mingus taught me that, how you could try to make a small or middle sized band sound sometimes like a big band, sometimes like a small group, have that flexibility. Booker Ervin, what a beautiful player. [You have to give stars.] On a recording like this, it’s stood the test of time. It’s got to be a 5. Of course.

He’s got that Trane thing happening. Coltrane influenced a lot of people, man. The guitar, that’s interesting. I wasn’t expecting the guitar. Man, there was like a budding genius… I forget his name. He played tenor and guitar and piano. Remember that guy? He died. [Arthur Rhames.] Arthur Rhames. [It’s not him, though.] But he had Trane down, though. Is tenor his only instrument? [He plays flute, soprano, but primarily tenor.] Wow. [He was very well known thirty years ago.] Is he still alive? [He’s still alive. This is a recent record.] This guy did an album of Billy Strayhorn… [Oh, Joe Henderson. It’s not Joe.] It don’t sound like Joe. You got me on this Bay Area thing, though. Who the hell was this… I got out of the Bay Area so fast. As soon as I got out of high school, I was gone. [Should I tell you?] No, let me hear it out. [You might want to think about who the drummer is, too.] [MIMICKING THE STROKES] Sounds like Billy Higgins. [It’s a studio band, though they did tour.] He just loved Coltrane, whoever the hell he is! But everybody loved Coltrane when I was growing up. [Where does he sound like he’s from?] Is this guy really old? [Not really old? [Not really old. The generation right before us.] Who’s this tenor player, he plays a lot in the studio… He had the same piano teacher who I studied with. He’s from the Bay Area, but he wouldn’t be the next generation before us. He would be 25 years before me. But he doesn’t sound like him. Tell me. [AFTER] Charles Lloyd! That’s Charles. He had that Trane thing down. I love Charles Lloyd. I guess he was in the Bay Area, but I always thought he was hanging out in L.A. Yeah, that’s the second time I’ve been stumped by Charles Lloyd. They played a piece for me in Japan one time, and all I could think of was John Coltrane. But that lets you know how well he absorbed the Coltrane legacy. He doesn’t necessarily sound like Coltrane that much now. But during that period he was certainly all over. [Well, that was the one piece on the album that was in Coltrane’s style. How many stars?] I’d have to give it at least 4 stars, because Billy’s back there playing and boppin’, and I’ll leave off one for creativity perhaps. How can I say it… Coltrane is such a large figure that… Can’t nobody do it like Coltrane. I don’t care who you are. That’s why, in my explorations of Coltrane, I tried to stay away from trying to sound like him, because that’s too easy. All the notes are written somewhere. When he studied Coltrane, I’m sure he absorbed it mostly from the records. In old times, you could slow it down and put it on 16 and get the solo, and then speed it back up. But now you’ve got all these Coltrane transcriptions. I have a book over here with all of the different versions of “Giant Steps,” transcriptions of just “Giant Steps”…

Doo-wop with like the shekere, an African kind of thing — that’s nice! That’s creative. I want the tenor player to play more. When was the recording made? [’99.] My first reaction would be… I know it’s not James Carter. What’s that guy? Who are some of the new guys… Whoever it is, they like me. I mean, I don’t know if they LIKE me, but they’re influenced by me. [That’s questionable.] Well, I hear it. [This guy is older than us.] Well, then it is questionable. [And he was very prominent when you came to New York. Although in a different area. Do you know who the shekere player was?] He’s an old guy. Chief Bey. It sounds like him on those shiko drums, that low drum. Can you play it again for me? It was so sparse, I could never get a fluidity thing. [I think that was in the arrangement.] Probably so. [Because it wasn’t his arrangement. He was playing someone else’s concept. I’ll give you a hint. This is a Kip Hanrahan project, and Milton Cardona is playing shekere.] Oh, Milton, yeah! He has a strident kind of tone; maybe it’s the recording. Is this guy alive? [Oh yeah.] [AFTER] I would have never got that. I like Michael Brecker. He can play his ass off. But it’s not something that I listen to often. [I was playing that because you’ve done so many things with African rhythms.] It’s interesting. I like the doo-wop part of it. He always comes up with good ideas. [It was Milton Cardona’s project, and they used him.] I’ve never consciously listened to Michael other than I used to hear him play sometimes at Seventh Avenue South through the wall, because I used to live through the wall there. I like him, but I would never have named him. 3½ stars.

Ah, this is “Solitude.” He has a nice touch. Is he from Chicago? [Yes, he is.] Sounds like Von to me. You know, that motherfucker is so bad. I was in a bar… He plays at the Apartment Lounge I think every Tuesday night or whichever night of the week. But whenever I’m there, it’s a must to go hear Von, because he’s one of the last great tenor players. See, I have a problem in general with… Certain people’s sounds stick in your head, because it really is their own. That’s probably why I got this one and didn’t get the others. I hear parts of people in other people’s sounds, but I hear pure Von. That’s him, man. He’s great. It’s just the way that people from Chicago play. When you hear Johnny Griffin, there’s a certain kind of distinctiveness between the beat. He’s going to fit as many notes, but it’s the way he lands that makes you know it’s him. [SINGS SUPERSONIC GRIFFIN PHRASE] Damn! How’d you get all those notes in that couple of beats there. Incredible. I’ll give that 5 stars for being Von, for all of the things he’s done and all of the people he has influenced, including his son, who is also great.

Sounds like Frank Wright. Is it that guy who used to play with Cecil? You know the guy who does those festivals… [William Parker.] Is that William? [Yes, that’s William.] [AFTER RAISING HIS EYES] I keep making these facial expressions because… Maybe it’s David Ware or somebody. I don’t know. [Not David Ware.] I don’t want to be negative, but I… Let me not be negative. [Be constructive.] What’s that guy that used to be homeless? [Charles Gayle. That’s who it is.] He wears a clown suit sometimes. In Europe, Sunny Murray did a gig with him, and he said he was wearing a clown suit. There’s a struggle that you can do when you play with your horn. When it’s not really relaxed, it sounds like you’re fighting your horn or something like that. That’s why I keep grimacing, is because I’m not hearing the fluidity. But what I do hear, I like the mood of the piece. I like what William Parker is doing. Let me think about who the drummer is now. It’s somebody I played with. That’s Andrew, it sounds like. [No.] I don’t know. [It’s Rashied Ali.] Rashied, okay. It’s hard to tell who’s playing when they play brushes. He knows how to play the brushes. I’ve got to give it 3 stars.

That beautiful string arrangement that Billy did. You know, I did a string arrangement kind of based on his string arrangements when I did the Ellington thing this past summer. We had a big band, plus we had 20 strings with 2 harps. So I kind of listened to what Billy had done with the arrangement he did for Ben. It’s beautiful, so I took that and tried to add to it. I had 20 strings. He only had a couple. But it sounded like a lot of strings; it sounded great. That’s the way the saxophone is supposed to be played. There’s no struggle. It’s like he’s having a conversation with you. Now, in the Billy Strayhorn book, he said that Ben was kind of proud of Billy, and he kind of took care of him like a little… I can see that happening, because he LOVED him, because he knew how great he was. They appreciated one another for their music. That’s what I aspire to be. [LAUGHS] I want to be just like that when I grow up. Shit, man, this is pure music. And it’s not the genre even. No, it’s not the genre. Like, the last thing… Well, I don’t want to go back. They could have been playing anything. But it’s just the way that you hold that horn, the way you use it as your form of expression, it’s almost like you love it… Do you love it, or is it just a piece, a thing that you use to spit through? Do you love it? He loves that horn! Shit. I don’t know if you were around when I did that string concert at the Public Theater years ago. I did all ballads. I think I had 14 strings. That was one of my most successful concerts, because people were actually weeping in the concert. I wasn’t weeping, but I had a little funny reaction, and then a couple of years after that this family comes up to me on the street and there’s this little baby, and they said, “You know, we have to thank you, because our son was conceived that night you played this concert; it made us really fall in love.” I did my job! To me that was the highest compliment that anybody ever paid. And Ben and Bird with Strings… Every saxophone player has to realize his potential in playing in front of the strings. I think it’s a wonderful. [So I don’t need to ask you how many stars for that.] Oh, man, if they could give more stars, they could give him the tip-top. That one stood the test of time, jack!

This is a classic recording. This is the one, right? Oh, it’s a remake of it! Oh, they got my piano player. That’s John Hicks, for sure. It sounds like Ray, too. Wait. No, that’s not Ray. Hell, no. He’d kill me! Let me put my thinking cap on. I like this one. [LAUGHS] Is that Curtis Lundy? [No.] I like his sound. He sounds a younger guy, but with that old sound. Whoever it is, he’s got it down. I can’t say I know who he is. I could take a wild guess, though. When was this recording made? [’98.] Who are some younger tenor players? I don’t really know who’s around. [AFTER] He sounds really good. He sounds excellent. I’d give it 4 stars, because it’s a remake of a legend. I’d give it 5 if it were the real thing. But John Hicks gets 5 stars for just being John Hicks, man!

I know this guy. I don’t want to be stupid too soon. I think I have a good idea already who it is. It’s not who I thought it was at first. I don’t know this guy’s name, but he is a contemporary of mine, this guy… No? [He’s older than you by a fair piece.] Is he living? [He is living.] It’s Sonny Rollins when he was going through his teeth problems. That’s what it sounds like. He’s going through his teeth problem. Because it ain’t CLASSIC Sonny. Ah, how can I say this without being negative to Sonny. It just sounds like he’s dealing with serious dental problems. Let’s talk about it. Let me say something different. Sonny Rollins, but… Let’s just say it’s not the period of Sonny Rollins that I really, really am fond of. I think Sonny Rollins… Sonny is such a… That’s why I was grimacing during that. Because when you play tenor, when it’s a struggle to play certain notes for somebody that great, you know there’s something physical going on. You can tell. Because some of the notes that he was struggling with, somebody with regular dental work wouldn’t have. So it probably was during the period of time when something like that was happening. Well, I loved it! It’s Sonny Rollins. I love Sonny Rollins. I mean, I love him for being Sonny Rollins. That’s not one of his best recordings, I would say. 3½ stars. He’s going to kill me.

Whoever this is, they have a very nice sound. You know, the saxophone is the kind of instrument, when it buzzes, you know you’ve got something. When you don’t hear that buzz, you get a flat sound. It’s too straight. This horn has got a buzz. It’s alive. He knows his horn. Now let me figure out who it is. Is he from this continent? [Yes.] I like the tune. It’s beautiful. [The saxophone player wrote it.] It’s great. He’s a good writer. It’s got that real international kind of sound. I’m not quite sure who it is. [He was also very prominent in your scene when you got to New York, and he was already in it.] Oh. In my scene. [Or parallel. And he’s old enough to be your father.] Okay. [And you’ll kick yourself if you don’t know who it is.] I will kick myself. Who’s the brother who teaches in upstate New York… [Not him.] Play me a little more. I don’t want to be kicked by myself. I love it. Whoever it is, I really dig it. [PLAY “Impulse”] My father is almost 75 years. [That’s how old he was when he made this.] Incredible. Is it Sam Rivers? He’s the only guy it could be! Sam Rivers is such a great person. He gave me my first gig in New York. It sounded like somebody who just knew… He’s probably forgotten more shit than most people know. It sounded like somebody like that. It really helped this other tune. I may have never gotten it with just that ballad. That’s a beautiful song. You know when you hear a song and it sounds like it doesn’t matter what year it was made… [It’s like Classical music.] Yeah, it’s like Classical music. It’s always going on. You could sing it in a different language, and it will still work. [Why did you ask if the saxophone player was from this continent?] Because at first it sounded like somebody from Brazil, like what somebody Ivo Perelman might do. I like Ivo. But then as it went on, it sounded like somebody more mature who has been through generations. And when you said he was old enough to be my father and you put on the faster song, I could hear Sam’s rhythms. Rhythmically, Sam has a different kind of expression because he’s been through so much, I guess. His rhythm is not like Sonny Rollins, where it’s like BOM-BOM, right on your head, the way he attacks. He’s snake-like; he kind of slides through. But he’s got that sound. God bless Sam Rivers, man. I hope he lives to be 100. I’d give that tune 5 stars.

Is it a recent recording? [Yes.] Everybody loves Coltrane, man! He’s probably the most quoted tenor player since Bird, I guess. I take it these are Spanish musicians. [Hispanic-American, U.S.-based. But mostly from Puerto Rico.] I’ll just take a guess that it’s David Sanchez or somebody like that. One time this guy had a funny idea to do a Three Davids — David Murray, David Sanchez and Fathead! It was funny, man. People run out of themes sometimes. So we did this thing. And it was nice. We did it with an organ player. I kind of remember his sound from there. I kind of like David Sanchez. He’s still young. He’s got a ways to go. But he’s going to be one of the great ones. I think in about two years he’ll be where he wants to be. It takes time to be… You’re thrown in there, and there’s this big fray in New York, and they expect you to be great already. And I’m sorry, it just doesn’t… I didn’t get my own sound til I was about 28, and I feel like I got it early. [So you feel you didn’t get your own sound until about ’83-’84.] Something like that. I had to absorb all this stuff around me, people saying this about me, they’re writing about, “Oh yeah, you’re the next blah-blah-blah.” What the hell, I don’t know, man. I’m trying to play my horn. So David Sanchez, he’s getting a lot of recognition, but at the same time, this is a young man. Give the guy a chance to develop. He’ll be good. I’ll give it 4 stars.

It’s two tenor players. Paul sounds different than before he really got plastered! [You think this is before or after?] This is before. When he gets really plastered… Here I am going negative again. But before he’s really libated…he slips and slides even more when he… Before that, he sounds more like a normal tenor player. You know what I’m saying? when he plays his little figures. But when he gets plastered, he sounds like he’s in his own zone. And I hate to say it for the youngsters, but the guy sounds good when he’s plastered! [LAUGHS] I don’t know! It’s like no abandon, just pure… I love Paul. He’s my favorite tenor player, man. This is definitely pre. He seems pretty sober here. [Then you have to figure out the other one.] Let me see who’s in the right here. Paul is in the left. This is like a separate recording from an Ellington project. This is not an Ellington project at all. They both sound wonderful. That’s all I know. He’s not an Ellington tenor player. [No.] Not at all. [Not at all.] This is from a whole nother zone. [He had his career as a hired gun.] Okay! With the correctness of the way he plays, it sounds like it could only be Sonny Stitt. What comes to mind is the Sonny Rollins-Sonny Stitt thing with Dizzy where they both play their ass off, then Dizzy ends up smokin’ them both! You’re not going to find two better tenor players on the planet anywhere than Paul Gonsalves and Sonny Stitt. [Any idea who the piano player is?] Let me hone in. Is he alive? {The piano player is alive. He’s an elderly guy now, but this was 40 years ago.] [AFTER] I couldn’t really get his left hand, but I should have figured that was Hank Jones. I played with Hank once in a tenor battle in 1978 at the Northsea Jazz Festival in the Hague. It was Archie Shepp, Lockjaw, Fathead. Hank Mobley got sick and I took his place. Illinois Jacquet was running the session. Hank Jones was on piano and Max Roach on drums and Wilbur Little on bass. That’s when everybody in Europe recognized me and said I hung pretty good with the old guys. So that was my moment. I’d say 4½ stars for this, only because I’ve heard Paul play better, I guess maybe for the reasons I mentioned! I don’t know why. But it passed the test of time again.

Is it one drummer? I like the tone of the sax player. I’m waiting for them to get into it. It’s nice how they got into it finally, like a lilt kind of. [4 minutes.] I’m not quite sure who this is, but the spirituality of it is something that I can sort of relate to. Is this a young player, or an older one? [A little younger than you; not too much.] Sounds good, though. [He’s someone you have encountered over the years. You’ve had a dialogue.] A word dialogue? [I just mean a dialogue.] Oh, a dialogue. That sounds good to me. You mean we played together. [I’m just going to say you had a dialogue!] Okay, man. I’m trying to figure out… It sounds familiar. Somebody that I know. Geez… It’s not Chico. [Okay, you played together.] I’m trying to think what tenor players I played with. A tenor player that I played with and is younger than me. [Not that much younger, but definitely affiliated with a different generation than you.] Branford Marsalis. He sounds good, man. The spirituality comes through. It sounds good! [So you can probably figure who the other guys were.] I guess with his band perhaps. Jeff Tain and the brother who just passed away, Kenny Kirkland. It was a very nice piece. I’m impressed. We encounter one another in Europe all the time. He’s playing a lot of soprano. He don’t play tenor that much on the gig. But I admire him. He’s a great player. I’ll give that 5 stars because the spirituality is there, and you feel something. [That was Tain’s record, not Branford..] Tain did a good record, then. God bless him.

It kind of sounds like Dewey. [Dewey’s influenced an aspect of his playing.] Dewey’s son. [No, it’s not Joshua.] Okay. He definitely likes Dewey. But he sounds good. I like the composition… [Who’s the drummer?] I wasn’t even listening for that. Give me a few more minutes, a little glimpse of the drummer. I’ll play you the one before, a duo. [PLAY “Modern Man.”] It’s definitely not Dewey now. He sounds completely different now to me. Is it a recent recording? [1991] I think I need a clue. [The saxophone player has become very prominent in this decade. This was a sort of breakthrough recording for him. And he’s a year or two older than you.] Oh, that’s great. Gee. A year or two older than me. It’s not Don Braden or someone like that. I don’t know who it is. [AFTER] Oh, I know Joe. I should have known that. I don’t really know his sound. He sounds good, though. I’ve seen him over in Holland; we were hanging out in Amsterdam. I don’t really know his sound, so I probably would have never guessed that. [Who’s the drummer? Do you know?] [AFTER] That’s Blackwell? No shit. 4 stars.

It sounds like they’re out of the Ornette Coleman school. Which is a great school. Sounds like Dewey to me. Is that Dewey? [No.] That’s Ornette on tenor! No wonder it’s out of the Ornette school! [LAUGHS] There’s one note Ornette always play when he plays tenor. He plays like he’s playing alto, and it just hits that note! I think he can play any saxophone. But I’d like to hear him play baritone one day. He probably could play the shit out of that, too. People have to recognize that there are… If we’re lucky enough while we’re here, we’ll come across maybe 3 or 4 geniuses whose music really is something that has a lot of influence, and Ornette is one of them. There aren’t many of them out here now left that their concept was maybe the strongest thing… The concept supersedes even the playing itself. That’s what brings his genius into it. That’s why you can hear his… When he did this thing at Lincoln Center, I heard about it. I heard it was wonderful. I want to hear some recordings from it. But those kinds of things Ornette is brilliant on. We need to hear him more. He gets 5 stars for all the abuse they’ve given him over the years

I’m waiting for the rest of the cats to come in, if there are such cats. right now it sounds reminiscent of Roscoe Mitchell, particularly with the way that the saxophonist is shaping the tone and… Hmm! Sounds a lot like Roscoe. Definitely has some Mitchellian approach to it. Especially by the staggered entrances that the cats have. On a previous blindfold test I was able to pick him out on tenor, so I’d be really surprised if I’m stumped! [LAUGHS] Is this the double quartet? No? This is just Shipp and Craig? It’s Craig? Oh, no! Good glivens! But yeah, that’s definitely Sco. That shows you how distinctive the cat is. Hey, that’s one of THE cats. Particularly on soprano and alto, he definitely has a personality all his own. I’d love to hear more of his bass saxophone playing, and perhaps we might have to get back in touch with one another and see if we can make this happen somewhere down the line. Because the last time we talked, he was just getting into the recorder real tight, and other baroque instruments as well, and he was kind of talking about acquiring Gerald Oshita’s sarrousophone and some other instruments he had in order to augment his own arsenal. I was looking along those lines, too, to really get a sarrousophone, but thankfully I did get one, which I premiered at our tenure last year at the Blue Note with the electric band. I played a James Blood Ulmer composition on it. Everybody couldn’t get over the size of the thing, first of all, not to mention what the hell was coming out of it. I’m into anything Roscoe does because his spirit is always at the helm of it, and dealing with other things. Five stars all the way . That energy in particular, and the way he concentrates his energy and eggs other people on regardless of whatever the personnel is, to get the energy going as well, whether it’s fast and furious or slow and concentrated. It has its way of oozing out methodically. It definitely is logical and makes you think.

Sounds like Branford. No? Well, there’s our stumper. I’m still going to justify that it sounded like Branford in the early part of the delivery because of the tone. In listening to the way the solo stars as well, it definitely has some Steeptonial approaches to it and all. But I quite sure we’ll find who this is a little later. So it’s not Steeptone, and it’s not… I don’t know how Lacy even came into this mix. Pardon me for even thinking that! This is really going to help. A piano solo! According to the little clue, we’re looking at ’65-’66 when this was happening. Let me scuttle on this one. Whoever this is, I can’t really say that they are tippin’ as a rhythm section and in the solos as a whole. I like the transition up a fourth from concert B-flat into E-flat in the solos and all, so that’s really hip, just to give it a whole other lift. Ah, and it resolves back down to the B-flat. Hmm! I’m drawing a blank on mid-’60 sopranos, for some reason. Of course, during that time, Trane’s influence was so prevalent. I know it’s not him! 4 stars. [AFTER] Lucky Thompson! Man! [LAUGHS] Now, that’s somebody I’d definitely love to do an album with. Tommy Flanagan? I certainly wouldn’t have thought it was him. My first reference of him playing soprano was the beginning of the ’70s. Other than that, with things like “Tricotism” on Impulse, he’s the sort of cat I think of on tenor. Yeah, flame on!

Whoo, lush strings! Cat’s hollering in the midst of strings! Hollering in the midst of the forest! Yeeooow! This sounds kind of recent, but I don’t want to say that. The passage there with the staccato sounds kind of Newkish. But I know it’s not Newk because he doesn’t use altissimo in that particular range. He goes a tad higher than that. Plus the guy’s ideas in the beginning don’t make reference to Newk. [Do you know the tune?] I have a hint of it. It’s one that I wouldn’t mind learning. There isn’t a whole lot that can really be done with it. I like the string arrangement. 3-1/2 stars. I liked it all around. It seemed like the piano and vibes were mirroring themselves, with the vibes seeming to piggyback off the piano, and it sounds kind of heavy, especially when certain tenor statements were being made, and it seemed to get in the way. It wasn’t a real homogenous sound, but more like here’s the piano over here and the brass over here, and the strings are situated somewhere in the center or back to give you a shiny dish over rice sort of feeling. [AFTER] Roland Kirk? If it was Rahsaan, one of the things… Now that I think about it, that high-C he did on there would have tipped me off to him, especially when you think of “Hog-Callin’ Blues.” This is 1969? One thing that would have tipped me off is if he’d done the obvious two-saxophone thing where he plays octaves with himself in certain spots. Also the use of double- and triple tonguing in certain areas. [Believe me, it was hard to find a piece by Rahsaan for you!]] You definitely did your work on this one to trip me out. It was definitely esoteric in certain areas where I wouldn’t have thought of it as Kirk.

Nice tenor beginning. That’s a nice ostinato going on with the piano and bass. Now more interactive. Sounds like Cecil Taylor a little bit, one of his extrapolated ideas of how boogie-woogie would be dealt with in the left hand and the accents… This cat’s hittin’! The pianist is happening. As disjunct and dense as it is, it has a full orchestra sound to me, the way the pianist is dealing. The saxophone is where I’m drawing some blanks! This is getting meaty! It isn’t Muhal either, is it. Damn! [What do you think about the saxophone player’s sound?] The way it was miked reminded me of the way I got miked for The Real Quiet Storm on certain things. I guess filtered is a good way to put it, as opposed to the open nasal passage sound that would normally expect when you hear it live. It has a filtered sort of quality to it. Stifled. I’m stumped. I liked the performance. 3-1/2 stars. [AFTER] I always loved Sam Rivers since Winds of Manhattan and Capricorn Rising with Pullen. [Was that recognizable as him now that you know his identity? Or was it a bad selection to give you?] It was definitely not a bad selection to give me. Part of the reason I dig these Blindfold Tests is the way they make you think on what’s happening now as well as what’s happened in the past. These selections make me think about what’s really being put down, what has been put down, and how one’s listening habits have changed over the years, and one’s perception as well. And also, it helps me go out and look for some other repertoire. Probably when I leave here, I’ll make a beeline for the Virgin Megastore over here on Broadway and see what else I can cop. So all selections are good.

We’ve got some spiciness here! “The Song Is You”. It has a Bobby Watson fluidity to it. This also sounds recent. It’s not part of that M-BASE thing, is it? Steve Coleman. I could tell certain things. It doesn’t sound like Osby, so this is the first logical choice. As soon as I heard the alternate stuff that was on it. So is it logical to say the tenor player might be Gary Thomas? No? Almost sounds like… I got some shades of John Stubblefield in there, but no. Taking it up the high area, the deliberate bending and shaking of certain notes. So we’re stumped tenor-wise. The second alto player is Osby, isn’t it? I think this is too early for the tenor player to be Shim. [Does the tenor player sound like a contemporary of theirs or someone older?] In certain areas it sounds like it might be a little older. I’ve definitely got to give mad props to the rhythm section keeping this stuff cooking at a nice intense little simmer. [on the 4’s] The tenor player is trippin’ out! There’s something about the high end that tenor player is using. Oh, aa double bass pedal! For some reason, that definitely rules out Cindy! I’m not saying she isn’t capable of it, but I’ve never seen it in any of our dealing. I’m definitely stumped on the tenor player. 4 stars. It was cooking, and there were some interesting tonalities going on in the midst of a nice staple like this. [AFTER] Man! It makes sense that it’s Von Freeman, when you think about it. He’s always seemed ahead of the time anyway. Definitely when you think of George Freeman and the One Night In Chicago that he did with Bird. I definitely agree with the liner notes that spoke of him as presaging Jimi Hendrix in a lot of explorations, like the distortion in his playing and his use of space and his deliberate lower tones, like the F and E he was using in certain areas. It was definitely ahead of the time. Different. So it makes a heckuva lot of sense to think of it from that standpoint. I had a chance to play with George Freeman when I was in Julius’ group, and I think we did The Last Supper At uncle Tom’s Cabin, and went to hang out on the South Side and caught a session, and George was part of the band. He was all the way up in the stratosphere! I haven’t actually met Von yet. George and Chico are the only ones I’ve played with.

[IMMEDIATELY] This is Hawkins. And I dare say early to mid ’40s. I own this one. I hear Carney in the beginning of it. One can one say about Hawkins and his playing, particularly during this time, when he got back from the five-year stint in Europe. Carney’s playing on baritone is indispensable. He’s the one who wrote the book on how baritone should be played and what one could look forward to in the future out of it from all the areas he’s played in. I was listening to something last night from 1927-28. Mostly you would think about the baritone as an immobile instrument during this time, but here’s Carney playing it with the same fluidity and agility as an alto — or a clarinet I even venture to say. This tune was up in tempo, and he was making all the changes. For somebody you’d think of as a “Sophisticated Lady” player, holding the one note and making the one statement and anchoring the section, this definitely shows you another side. Just one of the different facets that’s Duke’s men come out with in any situation. And this isn’t a Duke situation. I know this is a Hawkins date. Cozy Cole isn’t on drums on this, is he? No? Okay. Is the alto player Tab Smith? Another one of the technical cats who could also fly up there. He reminds me of a variation off of Benny Carter’s playing. The attack is more exaggerated, but it still comes out of that same school. Nice diction. It’s more chopped-up, but it still swings. the pendulum’s just rocking that much harder! Yeah, give it, Bean! The first tenor solo was… Play it back! He was only dealing with a couple of people at that time. It’s either Byas or Frog [Ben Webster] But I knew Hawkins was on this . That’s Byas. It sounds like it’s during the time he was using that radio-approved saxophone, too. One of Hawkins’ children. Right up under there. Five stars. Times two. Exponentially.

Piano and baritone. And drums. And a rhythm section. And a whole band. A bari feature! Hot damn. Some tonation problems there… If it’s not Pepper Adams, it sounds like someone who’s been listening to Pepper. I think it’s Pepper! Then I’ll go out on a limb and say Smulyan. He’s from the Pepper school. Which is a great thing. When you think about the axes, Pepper was always a Selmer cat, and to get this same sound out of a Conn, which I know is Smulyan’s instrument of choice, is a great feat. Then again, it’s also the mouthpiece. But in that particular era, to have the extra nuts in reserve and to have something that’s not… The tune is definitely a groover and it’s got enough changes to keep you going mobile in your thinking… Coming from a player’s standpoint, not to mention a listener’s, there’s enough harmonic material and information in there to leave you wanting more. It has a Perry Mason sort of feel, like incidental music. It might be the EQ’ing on this system, but he goes into the background especially when it’s time for the arrangement to come back in. Those situations are the nuts are supposed to come in. That was the climax. 3 stars.

Nice little tenor in the back. Some low percussive instrument. Is this just a duo? Oh I did say there was something percussive in the back. Nice esoteric interactions. It sounds akin to Parker and Graves, Charles Gayle running up the middle! No, it’s too tame for Charles! It sounds familiar. You’re enjoying this, aren’t you! It’s starting to heat up now! But I’m stumped as to who it is. Now, they’re definitely doing it up. I can hear some other things the tenor player could be doing. I mean, the bass player is all over the place, and the tenor player is not meeting the bass player’s energy. It’s like he’s echoing his ideas that were in the slower part of it. He’s still in largo; my man went off in vivace on him! Maybe if the drummer was in at the time, that would probably help. But then, that could be another component he’d have to meet as well. He didn’t meet him, considering what the man is doing bowing-wise. That’s a lot of momentum in what my man is doing bow-wise to sustain everything. Uh-oh! 3-1/2 stars for the bass player’s energy… Well, the collective energy as a whole, but the bass player really is sticking out to me. He’s got some [Fred] Hopkins up in there. He knows the overtone series. Yeah! Okay! Yeah! All right, surprise me. [AFTER] The cat from Chicago? The old Fred Anderson? I could have used more energy from him, considering where the bass player was going. 3-1/2. I give props to anybody who’s that age and is dealing.

Uh-oh, frying the bacon! Chu Berry. Lionel Hampton. This is right before his untimely death, probably late ’40 or early ’41. But this was done along that same time when Lionel Hampton did the version of “Sweethearts On Parade” and a couple of other tunes. What can be said about Chu Berry? My God. Somebody who definitely died too young. Don Byas’ predecessor in terms of playing in between changes. He always had that driving, rolling, authoritative tone. Which is why, of course, he was Hawkins’ logical successor in the Fletcher Henderson band, I feel. In talking with older individuals such as Buddy Tate, there were some other things I got to learn about him. He also circular-breathed, and also repaired his own instruments, which I think was a real unknown phenomenon then for musician. I mean, he actually repaired his axe. I don’t mean put a little
piece of foil and bring a rubber band over here sort of repair. None of that. He actually finessed his axe, from what Buddy Tate and a couple of cats told me. I feel akin to him in a lot of ways. I repair my own axes, and I like that rolling, authoritative sound, like I’m here, happy to be here. He was really coming into his own at the time that he passed. Lionel Hampton, Chu Berry, all them cats. 5-plus stars for all classics like that. Thank God for them. Thank God for Chu Berry and all the cats who paved the way.

That’s interesting. “Heaven.” Is this Charles Lloyd? I remember Forest Flower, and it had that same sort of attack. We had a saxophonist in Detroit by thee name of Sam Sanders who had that sort of approach, where he muffles and then there are some expletives in there at the peaks. So I’m able to align myself with that. The rhythm-section is easy, laid-back. The piano. Mmm! Yeah! I haven’t really peeped that much of Charles Lloyd over the years, with the exception of Forest Flower and hearing other things on the radio, but without a conscious, premeditated effort, but I’ve always noticed that he’s had a very distinctive sound. He looks distinctive in the way that I’ve seen him on albums and seen him play maybe once, while on tour. It’s got a round, shapeable sort of tone that was almost akin to C-melody when it started out, particularly in the middle register. And I like the meditative flow of it, so 4 stars.

A baritone-guitar thing, huh. It almost sounds like Bluiett. I’m judging by the semblance in tonal weight in what I’m hearing. I think it would have gone somewhere else if it was, but this is still kind of early. [SOLO STARTS] It is Bluiett! This is before 1994. I know that.. I can judge because this is that Selmer. He didn’t have the low-A. This is a low-A on here. Whooo! That’s Bluiett. That’s what they should have had the Velvet Lounge! That would be interesting. Him and that bad cat Peter Kowald. What happened in ’94 is Bluiett sold his horn to Bob Ackerman for a Conn that he’s now playing and some money. I was so outdone when he did that, because I wanted that mug. I mean, there’s a whole lot of history up in that horn. This is the same horn that was at the Mingus thing, from the onset of the World Saxophone Quartet — his natural axe. He said one of his students wound up getting it from Ackerman. This is a bad horn! I don’t feel bad now, because I’ve since got the one that was on all the Motown stuff. [Do you know who Bluiett’s playing with?] It sounds like Sharrock or someone like that. Is this Blood? And this isn’t Jamaladeen, is it? It sounds too disjunct and too thumbish to be him. I could see this going off into a funk groove every time that comes up, but it goes back into he free thing, and it’s like a catch-me-if-you-can sort of thing. You want to just break that mug down, but it doesn’t go that way, and it’s like, “Oh, man, we’re back into it again.” I like it, though. Tonal-wise and agility-wise, Bluiett is my logical extension of what Carney did. When you think about distinctive tones, it just stuck out in my mind even before hearing him play. The only thing that took me off-guard was that it was a Selmer recording as opposed to listening to him in the last couple of years on this Conn, which as I mentioned before, with Smulyan’s, has a different weight to it that Selmers don’t have. Also, a certain type of cat can transcend the characteristics of any given make of instrument and make it his own, and Bluiett is definitely indicative of that. 5 stars. [AFTER] Cornell Rochester! We did a trio, Cornell, Jamaladeen and myself at the Groningen Festival in the Netherlands in either ’93 or ’94. We were all over the place that year. Then also, during that time, I was dealing with the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra and the Mingus thing, and I was in the meat of my dealings with Lester and Julius at this time as well. J.C. On The Set pretty much came out that year in Japan and was making its way back state-side the following year.

Whoever this has this Brecker-Joe Henderson thing going on. The composition sounds like “Inner Urge” here and there. The fluidity reminds you of a Breckerish sort of thing. Now little splashes of Wayne going on in there, too. I like the vibe player’s feel, too. Stefon? Sure it’s not, huh? Cat’s got a nice feel. This cat is moving! I like this cat! I like to hear instruments that you don’t hear played in a conventional style, where you wind up hearing a cross pollination of influences, where you don’t think of a vibe player just playing block chords with four mallets. You actually the cat influenced by saxophone and piano players. This isn’t Margitza, is it? All right, that was a first stab, ladies and gents. I like the shades of the “Inner Urge” feel it has. Very mobile. It’s like I can almost call off the changes just by hearing it go by. E-flat. F. G-sharp. G-flat. Yeah! A-minor back to B-flat. Nice, tied-together rhythm section. The whole thing is tight. 4 stars.

Ah, they’re shuffling the deck. That organ’s another mug, man. It almost sounds like David. Especially when he smears at the beginning of the notes. That’s reminiscent of what I think he got out of the Rollins bag. Yup, that is him. Big bruh’! [LAUGHS] One of the things with David, I noticed… Good anecdote. When we did Kansas City, the one tune he wound up playing on, where he played Herschel Evans, which I think seemed kind of ironic, where I’m in the part of Ben Webster, and he’s looking like Ben Webster like a mug! But when he played Coleman Hawkins’ entry line on that section there, he sounded just like Hawkins, with the embellishments and everything. When you think of somebody who pretty much the media wants to say he doesn’t have any semblance of history… The same thing with Cecil Taylor. I hear history in these players. It’s what I aspire to, to always have the history at the fingertips and be able to expound upon it. After he did the actual Hawkins passage going into the solos, and he just went from there… Of course, it was kind of far-fetched when you think of the 1934 period that we were trying to represent, and all of a sudden you have this cat going into the upper register of the horn and just playing! It was definitely something akin to David, but at the same time he let you know within that short amount of time that “I still know the history, but this is me nonetheless.” I think those people who were there might have missed that. That was an epiphany for me. I always knew that, but it just reminded me. The same as the first time I saw Sun Ra play. They were space-chording for like 15 minutes or so during the first part of a 60-75 minute performance, and broke it down into “Queer Notions,” just like this. Had three drummers playing, and John Gilmore was playing the whole Coleman Hawkins thing, note-for-note, the outgoing passage, the whole bit. Did the same thing with “Yeah, Man.” All the cats played all the solos. That was a great epiphany for me.

Getting back to the meat of the matter with this, the cats are rocking. That’s the first thing I noticed with the organ trio. Amina? No? [Does it sound like someone who plays a lot of organ trio function?] Definitely, with a shuffle like that. Oh, man! No, that’s definitely not Amina. I don’t know what… Sorry, Amina. It almost sounds like a MIDI keyboard. When you think of the Smith groove-Jack McDuff sound that has that analog, this sounds really cleaned up. That’s what I’m really thinking. That Leslie sort of oscillating vibe. Sounds like a clean roller rink sound. I’m stumped. [AFTER] I could have used a little more meat in the organ. But they were rocking, and Cyrille was shuffling the deck as if he was one of them Jo Jones type cats. Hmm! He had his deck of cards with him. And David is always the voice as far as I’m concerned.

[AFTER 8 BARS] “Ode to Pres”. Part of the Pablo series, Basie Jam #2. So this is probably John Heard. Lockjaw Davis is on it. That’s Clark Terry. Budd Johnson, playing baritone! It’s so hip how you can take just one idea from a great cat such as Pres. This whole song as based on his opening line off “Jive At Five.” Lockjaw Davis is on it, and all of a sudden turn that one phrase into a blues like this. The Basie style, of course, just tipping, and Freddie Green behind him on guitar just tippin’. That’s Sweets. Okay, so it’s Clark Terry, Sweets, Budd Johnson, Lock… I know Lock’s on it. The cats just got together! Was Joe Pass playing? No? He’s on Jam #3. That is Freddie Green. I remember the picture. Hit it, Lock! Dang! “Ode To Pres” always. Basie… That’s just magic is always there. Tight. Cats just getting their collective freak on, and just merry music-making at its best. Ten stars.
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Blindfold Tests to me are always musical way-stations, if you will, to one’s perceptions of how he perceives other people, and also possibilities he can hear if he superimposed himself in a situation like that. Just like when you watch a game, kind of in the sense of, “Oh, man, if I was there!” Kind of after the fact. It’s kind of like 360, but at the same time it isn’t, because you don’t know who it is. But it’s always great to weigh in and see where my perceptions are and hopefully utilize them. Definitely you can always say that there’s been some great music that’s been played and that continues to be played. That’s what I get out of these, whether I know the individual or not. Like, the Coleman Hawkins and Chu Berry recordings has definitely inspired to take another listen to those particular albums. Because I know I have them from the Classics series, the French issues.

For the thirtieth and perhaps final installment of the National Endowment of the Arts Jazz Masters Awards, the NEA selected a quartet of hardcore individualists, who have steadfastly followed their own path through the decades: Drummer Jack DeJohnette, tenor saxophonist Von Freeman, bassist Charlie Haden, and singer Sheila Jordan. Stalwart trumpeter-educator Jimmy Owens received the 2012 A.B. Spellman NEA Jazz Masters Award for Jazz Advocacy. Heartiest congratulations to all.

Von Freeman’s designation is particularly gratifying to this this observer. Active on the Chicago scene since the end of the ’30s, when, after graduating from DuSable High School, he got his first lessons in harmony from the mother of his DuSable classmate Gene Ammons. Before enlisting in the Navy, he briefly played in a big band led by Horace Henderson (Fletcher’s brother), he marinated slowly towards his mature conception. As perhaps his most famous acolyte—and close friend—Steve Coleman put it recently: “Von looks inward a lot. He’s not a person who buys a lot of books or any of this kind of stuff. He just meditates from the inside. So it took him a lot longer to develop this thing. He told me himself that he didn’t feel like he understood harmony until he was like 50 years old, which is kind of late.”

Indeed, Freeman was 50 when he made his first leader recording, Have No Fear, produced for Atlantic by Rahsaan Roland Kirk, who hired Sam Jones and Jimmy Cobb to swing the proceedings along with Chicago pianist “Young” John Young. Although he never left Chicago, his discography—and international reputation—has multiplied, and he has remained at the top of his game.

I’d heard Von a number of times during my ’70s residence in Chicago, and was able to continue doing so once he began gigging in New York at the cusp of the ’80s, after recording four two-tenor sides with his son, Chico Freeman on side 2 of a fine Columbia recording called Fathers and Sons (the rhythm section was Kenny Barron, Cecil McBee, and Jack DeJohnette; Side 1 featured Ellis, Branford, and Wynton Marsalis). The audiences were usually on the small side. I can recall a winter engagement at the Public Theater maybe in 1982 when about 15 people heard Von play non-stop for two hours with Albert Dailey on piano and Dannie Richmond on drums; twenty years later, after he’d turned 80, I saw him do the same thing at Smoke before a much more crowded house on an extraordinarily kinetic set during which he kept prodding pianist Mulgrew Miller with the exhortation, “Be creative!”

I had the honor of hosting Freeman on at least three—maybe four—occasions on WKCR after 1987. I’ve posted below the proceedings of a conversation conducted on January 19, 1994, a bitterly cold week when Von, for the first time, was headlining a quartet at the Village Vanguard with Michael Weiss on piano, Rodney Whitaker on bass, and Greg Hutchinson on drums. The weather dampened the turnout, but not the heat of invention. [Note: I’ve interpolated a few of Von’s remarks from an earlier, 1991 WKCR appearance.]

* * *

I was at the Vanguard for the first set last night, and I gather you’d had maybe a 45-minute rehearsal.

VF: [LAUGHS]

But the group sounded like you’d been on the road for a month or so.

VF: Well, those guys are great, man. And they listen. To me, that’s one of the biggest parts of it all, listening to one another and appreciating what… I know it sounds old-fashioned, but it still works — for me.

It seems to me that that’s something you encourage in your bands. Having seen you with a number of groups and a number of young musicians, you will set up impromptu situations in the middle of a piece, like a dialogue with the drummer or dialogue with the bass player, to keep everybody on their toes.

VF: Oh, yes. But that’s old-fashioned, actually. All the older cats did that.

Do you mean old-fashioned or do you mean something that’s happening as part of the natural course of improvising?

VF: No. What I mean is, I never really try to leave my era. I might mess around with it a little bit, but I’m from that other thing.

When you say “that era,” what do you mean by that?

VF: Well, I mean I’m from that Jazz thing, from Duke Ellington, Jimmie Lunceford, all the great big bands of that era. I used to go to a lot of rehearsals, actually, and I used to notice the way that things were done.

Who were some people whose rehearsals struck you?

VF: Oh, like Horace Henderson.

Well, you played a little bit with Horace Henderson before you went in the Navy.

VF: That’s right. And Horace Henderson, man, knew how to rehearse a band! And I was amazed. Like, I didn’t know nothin’ about nothin’ when I was in his band. He would take me aside and say, “Now, listen. All you got to do, young man, is listen.” He said, “And don’t play too loud!” — because I was full of hire and full of wind. 17, you know. I was ready to blow, baby! He said, “Just cool, and play like you’re playing in your living room.”

And man, let me tell you something. I was once in the one of the warm-up bands in Atlantic City, and the great Count Basie Band was playing. Man, I was sitting in the front seat talking, and a lady was talking to me, and the band was shouting. But it wasn’t loud. It was weird! It was eerie. These cats were swingin’, and Count did not have a mike on the piano. And you could hear every note he played. Well, from my previous instructions I could tell what they were doing. They were just playing like they were in their living room. And it came out as one big, beautiful, soft, quiet-with-fire sound.

So I try to inject that. Because I hate to hear little bands sound like big bands. Ooh, that disturbs me. I see four or five cats making enough noise to sound like a concert band, ooh, it gets on my nerves.

Also in that period were you able to talk to older saxophone players?

VF: Oh, sure.

Were people willing to pass down information to you?

VF: Oh yeah. They were beautiful.

Who were some of the people in Chicago who served that role for you? Because you’ve certainly served it for a couple of generations of young Chicago musicians.

VF: Oh, yes, I’ve been lucky that way. Well, like I told you last time, we talked about Dave Young, who just passed last year. And…oh, listen, Tony Fambro, Goon Gardner…

Who played with Earl Hines for a few years.

VF: Yes. Oh, listen, just so many guys. I couldn’t begin to name them all. Because at that time, the information was freely given. Everybody was trying to encourage the younger guy, because they realized that was the future. Nobody was hiding anything, no information was classified. Because at the end of the thing, if you don’t have the feeling, nothing’s going to happen anyway. You can show a guy everything you know, but if he has no heart, he might as well deal shoes or something.

As you’ve discussed in probably three thousand interviews, you were a student of Walter Dyett, the famous bandmaster at DuSable High School…

VF: Oh, yes.

…along with maybe a couple of dozen other famous tenor players.

VF: Oh, yes, that’s the land of tenor players. Everybody plays tenor.

But you never repeat yourself! So what’s today’s version of your impressions of Walter Dyett? And also, the musical talent at DuSable High School when you attended in the 1930’s?

VF: Well, during that time, Walter Dyett was the man on the South Side of Chicago. We’d all tell lies to go to DuSable. Because they had these school districts. And everybody wanted to be in his class, and get some of that baton across the head, and get cussed out by him — because he was free with the baton!

A democratic disciplinarian.

VF: That’s right! But he taught by osmosis more than anything. He would encourage you to be a free spirit — with discipline. And even today I can see how important that is, to be as free as you can, but have discipline — in all things.

You’d been playing music since you were little.

VF: Oh yeah. I’ve had a saxophone stuck in my mouth since I was about three.

And music was in your family.

VF: Well, actually, my father fooled around with trombone. Of course, my mother is still in church and almost 97; she’s always been a choir singer and tambourine player, and she’s sanctified, so that beat, baby.

So you’ve really been listening to a whole range of music since you were out of the womb.

VF: Yes. Because my father actually dug concert music, see. The only thing I didn’t hear much of was Blues — Blues per se. I heard Louis, Fats Waller and people like that play the Blues, and he had some records by Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, the classic blues singers. So I guess I ran the gamut of musical expression.

When did you start going to concerts and different events on the South Side? There was so much music in Chicago in the Twenties and Thirties, and I imagine you grew up right in the middle of a lot of it, and you were probably playing a fair amount of it from a pretty early age.

VF: Oh yes, I played in some things. But you must understand, though, that during that era there was a lot on the radio. Like B.G., Benny Goodman was on the radio, Count Basie was on the radio, Earl Hines was broadcasting right from the Grand Terrace in Chicago, Fats Waller was on the radio, Jimmie Lunceford, Erskine Hawkins (who just passed), a lot of the big bands were played on the radio. And they were doing remotes from different parts of the country. So that was a thing that, of course, a lot of the young guys can’t hear because you don’t have that any more. Duke was always on the radio. You might even go to a movie and see a Jazz band in the movie, which you hardly ever see now.

A lot of the bands would stay over in Chicago, too. Say, the Ellington band might be someplace on the South Side for two weeks, and they’d be in the community.

VF: That’s right. Well, we had, of course, the Regal Theatre and the Savoy Ballroom, and all the big bands came through there, and that was right on 47th Street, right in the heart of the South Side. I’m very lucky to have been a part of that scene and play with a lot of the guys in the bands. When I say play with them, I had a little band, they might have sat in with me or something. And it was beautiful just to stand beside them or stand there and watch them in person. Because there’s so much to learn from just watching the way a person performs.

Who were the people who impressed you when you were 14, 15, up to going into the Navy, let’s say, around 1942?

VF: Actually, they were mostly trumpet players. See, I played trumpet for about twenty-five years. And Hot Lips Page, man. You don’t hear much about that cat, but that cat was a beautiful cat, man, and knew how to lead and rehearse a band. And the way he played, I guess it was out of Louis, you would say. And Roy Eldridge; I was with him for five minutes.

He lived in Chicago for some time in the 1930’s, too.

VF: Yes. So those two trumpet players impressed me with their power and with their know-how about how to treat the public and how to treat a band. All that is very important if you call yourself a bandleader. See, there’s a whole lot of people standing in front of bands that are not really bandleaders. I would call them front men. But being able to have the men, not demand any… It’s a terrible thing to have to demand things out of your sidemen. It shouldn’t be a command. It should be a thing where they respect you so much that they want to do things to take care of business.

Well, on the tenor you’ve credited your style as being an amalgam of listening to Coleman Hawkins and Lester Young, who both were around Chicago a lot.

VF: You know, I never knew. My father loved the cats, and he’d hang around them. You know, he was a hanger. He’d hang out with them. He was a policeman, but he was a different type of policeman; he never arrested anybody or gave out tickets or anything! So he was hanging with the cats all the time. And I’m certain that’s how he met Hawk.

Prez I met personally because I would hang out at the Regal. Whenever Count Basie came to town, man, I was sitting down front, me and my little cats that would hang out with me. We all knew Prez’s solos note for note. We’d stand there, and Prez would run out. Of course, Prez would look at us, because we were right down front making all this noise, and we… Like, they’d play “Jumping At The Woodside,” and we’d wait for Prez to come out. Well, Prez used to say…[SINGS REFRAIN], but he’d play all kinds of ways. We were singing his solos, hands up in the air like he’d hold his horn, and he looked at us like he wanted to kill us!

But Prez was beautiful, man. I was crazy about him personally. Hawk, too. And Ben Webster was one of my favorites. See, I would say that my style, if I have a style, is just a potpourri of all the saxophone players. Because I have so many favorites.

One thing that’s very distinctive and makes your sound almost instantly recognizable is that you change the dynamics of a song constantly, almost like you were singing it like a Blues singer. From one phrase to the next you’re in a different area, and you always have control. How do you do that? Is it a lip thing? Do you do it with the fingering?

VF: Well, a person last night pulled me aside and said, “Man, you’re really fooling around with that horn.” But I just think that’s a Chicago thing. Because I think all the cats from around Chicago play like that. To me, we all sound something alike. I don’t even realize what I’m doing, because what I try to do is very, very hard, and especially as I get younger. Because I would like to be able to do like I used to see Bird do and Roy do. Man, they’d come on a gig and didn’t say nothin’, and start playing. Sometimes Bird wouldn’t even tell you what he was playing. But he was so hip, he’d play some little part of it, and you’d know what the song was. And it would sound like an arrangement. I’d say, “How did he do that?” Because most people have to have music written out, and rehearse people to death. And Bird would play with us, and he’d elevate us to another level. I’d play, man, and I wouldn’t even realize it was me playing. I’d say, “What’s going on here?” But it’s just that man was so powerful. Roy Eldridge was so powerful. Hot Lips Page, I played with him, man, and he just said, “Hey, son, come here.” Boom, he’d start playing, and he would just take you in. And I think that’s all it is, that you rehearse and practice, rehearse and practice, practice and rehearse, and get out there and say, “Hey, I’m going to do it.”

Well, I think at the time when you were encountering Charlie Parker, you were part of the family house band at the Pershing Ballroom and different venues in Chicago.

VF: Oh, yes.

So you’d be up on the stage with Bird or whoever else would be coming through Chicago. That lasted about four or five years, didn’t it?

VF: Yes, it did.

Was it 52 weeks a year?

VF: Well, yes, because that was the only little gig I had, really, at the time. I was glad to have it, I’m telling you! And it was so beautiful, because I met all of the great cats… Every one of them was just great, treated us great, and tried to help us — because we all needed plenty of help. They’d tell us chord changes, say, “Hey, baby, that’s not really where it is; play C-9th here.” So it was beautiful.

And I really didn’t realize how great it was until I looked around, and all the cats were like gone. You know, man, it just breaks your heart, because some of them left so early, you know.

One thing I really remember, man, I was at the Pershing Ballroom upstairs this time (actually, this was called the Pershing Lounge), and Ben Webster used to come by, man, and he’d sit around… You know, I always loved him, and I could never get him to bring his horn, could never get him to play. And he would say “Oh, baby, everybody’s forgotten Daddy Ben.” I said, “Man, ain’t nobody gonna never forget you.” And I played some of his tunes, you know, that he made famous. And my biggest thing was I’d buy him those half-pints! But hey, man, things like that, when you turn around and you think back, and all the cats are like gone. And I just wish I’d have asked him a million questions. But I never really asked him anything, except how did he get that beautiful tone, and of course, he laughed and told me, “Oh, just buy a number-five reed” — something like that, you know. So I find myself giving cats the same thing.

Did you?

VF: Yeah. You know, you go get a 5-reed, and you couldn’t even get a sound out of it! But so many things that… The great Art Blakey said something that stuck with me. He said, “Hey, man, you have to earn it.” It’s best to let people find it. If they don’t find it, well, hey.

[OF THE SELECTION TO FOLLOW] You’re backed here by a top Chicago rhythm section, Jodie Christian on piano, Eddie DeHaas on bass, and Wilbur Campbell on drums, with whom you go pretty far back.

VF: Oh, listen baby, we go back to DuSable, actually. Well, I’m older than he is. But it’s generally the same era. And Jodie, well, I’ve known him since he was very young. So it was a thing where we had… But I always like to include this, that it was just luck. Because I didn’t take any music in there or anything. And they said, “Hey, man, what are you going to play?” I said, “Hey, how do I know?” So that’s the way that was.

I’ll tell you, man, I was sitting there listening to “Mercy, Mercy Me” — I think I was in another kind of mood! But it’s all a part of saxology. Yeah, that tenor saxophone, man, it’s just… That instrument is just so open.

People call it an extension of the human voice, and you’re certainly a tenor player whose voice, right from the first note you know it’s Von Freeman.

Well, thank you. But actually, what I just try to do is fitting in, try to get something… I wouldn’t even say that I have a style, really. I just go with the flow. That’s what I try to do. I’ve played in so many different types of groups and bands. See, because when you have children and you’re trying to raise them, man, you have to do a lot of things, whether you want to do them or not, to earn a living. So I’ve played in all types of bands, polkas, played Jewish weddings — just all kinds of things.

I’m sure each one of them was the hippest polka band, or the hippest…

VF: Well, you know, sometimes cats would look at me and say, “What is this nut doing?” But I always tried to find a little something where I could lean into it. So I’m open to all types of music, all types of feeling, and try to play up to my potential, which I think is one of the secrets, is trying to express yourself. Because that’s the only way that I play, is to try to express myself and still please people. Not all of them, but let’s say at least 50 percent of them.

Well, I’d say you’ve probably had experience at dealing with 99.9 percent of the possible audiences that a musician can encounter.

VF: Yes, I certainly have. And I’ve found out as long as you’re being true to your own spirit and your own feeling, someone will dig it. So that’s the premise that I go on right today, is just get up and try to really express myself. And if I express myself honestly and truthfully, I find that I move somebody.

One of the first groups that I worked with, I can’t quite remember this man’s name now, but he was the drummer. The only thing I can really remember about him was he sat so low. He sat like in a regular chair, and it made him look real low down on the drums. I said, “I wonder why this guy sits so low.” You could hardly see him behind his cymbals. And we were playing a taxi dance. Now, you’re probably too young to know what those were.

I’ve seen them in the movies, but I’m certainly too young to have experienced them first-hand.

See, what you did was, you played two choruses of a song, and it was ten cents a dance. And I mean, two choruses of the melody. When I look back, I used to think that was a drag, but that helped me immensely. Because you had to learn these songs, and nobody wanted nothing but the melody. I don’t care how fast or how slow this tune was. You played the melody, two choruses, and of course that was the end of that particular dance. Now, that should really come back, because that would train a whole lot of musicians how to play the melody. I was very young then, man. I was about 12 years old. I was playing C-melody then. That was my first instrument. That really went somewhere else, see, because that’s in the same key as the piano. But it was essential. And of course, I worked Calumet City for years, and I learned a lot out there!

That version of “Mercy, Mercy Me” put me kind of in the mood of some of Gene Ammons’ recordings, particularly “My Way,” where it just spiraled up..

VF: Oh yes.

He was a couple of years younger than you, and you were probably in the same class at DuSable for a few years.

VF: Oh, yes. Oh, man, the Jug! Jug’s one of my heroes of all time. See, the Jug came from a musical family. His father, of course, was the great Albert Ammons. And his mother was a beautiful woman who played Classical music on piano. I used to go by Jug’s house… She asked me one day, she said, “Son, you’re playing by ear, aren’t you” — because she had been on her son about that years earlier. She said, “The ear is beautiful, but you should learn more about chords.” I said, “Really?” And she said, “Hey, come over here,” and she sat down at the piano and started playing chords. That actually was my first knowledge (I was about 14) about chords. Because I always played by ear. They used to call me Lord Riff, because I could riff on anything. I didn’t know what I was doing, but I was riffing by ear, you know. And she started me out. And his brother, Edsel, was a pianist that played Classical music.

Oh, Jug was miles ahead of all us little guys, because he had this musical history out of his family. Plus, the Jug was a great dude. He used to take me aside, give me gigs. It was funny, man. He used to hire me to play in his place, and I’d go out and they’d say, “Where’s the Jug?” I’d say, “Well, the Jug, he…” “Not you again!” But I survived it, see. But I give the Jug a whole lot of credit, because he just sort of opened up the saxophone around Chicago. But again, he’s one of those cats that was playing in between Hawk and Prez, just like the rest of us.

Someone who went to DuSable also who was a little younger than you was Johnny Griffin, whose career started very young.

VF: Oh, that’s another one of my heroes. Well, Johnny picked up a horn one day and got famous. He’d been playing two hours! That’s the kind of genius he is. Well, Johnny Griffin is… In fact, I credit Johnny for the upsurge in my career, when he invited me to play along with him at the Lincoln Center. I had never really been critiqued by the New York critics. A few mentions about whatever playing I was doing. But when I played the Lincoln Center with Johnny, he had his great little group, and they put me along with two of the greats from New York, and I brought along John Young, and we played — and the critics really praised John and myself. That really boosted my career. Of course, Johnny had nothing to gain by putting me on the program with him, because when you have two tenors, they’re going to start comparing folks. But I just love him for that, for having had the guts to even do that.

That’s sort of a stylized outgrowth of something that happened very naturally in Chicago, with a lot of musicians getting up on the bandstand and doing what’s called cutting contests…

VF: Yes.

That, of course, is something that people might think of when they think about Jazz and Chicago.

VF: Oh, surely. Surely. So when Johnny did that, he had nothing at all to gain by putting me on there. But it was just beautiful. The last time I saw him, I kissed him and I said, “Thanks, baby.”

Sonny Stitt is another one of my heroes. He taught me so much about saxophone. See, I toured with Sonny. A lot of cats weren’t that hip to Sonny, because Sonny had kind of a cold attitude. He loved perfection, and he didn’t stand for anything less. But to me, man, he was one of the all-time greats on the saxophone.

Well, on your 1972 release for Atlantic, which has been out of print for a while, called Doin’ It Right Now, Ahmad Jamal wrote a little note about you which I’ll read. It says: “Great musical ability is found in the Freeman family. My introduction to this fact dates back to my first years in Chicago, beginning in 1948. During the Forties and Fifties were the golden years for the saxophonist in Chitown, and Von Freeman was in the thick of things. I had the pleasure of working with Von, George and Bruz, and certainly considered this family an integral part of the music history.” What’s your memory of Ahmad Jamal coming to Chicago?

Well, you know, he was around Chicago and not really doing that much. I happened to have a little gig at a place called the Club De Lisa, which used to be one of the main spots, but it had been burned out a couple of times and it had really gotten down to nothing. And that’s where I first met him. And I said, “Man, you play beautifully. What’s your name?” He told me. And I said, “I’ve got a few little old gigs. Will you make them with me?” He said, “Yeah, man, but I’ll tell you. I’m not much of a band player. I’m a trio player.” I said, “Man, the way you play, you’ll fit in with anybody.” He was playing sort of like Erroll Garner then. And man, he came with me, and he stayed about two years or so. And I just thought he was just great. Of course, I was proven out, because he went on to make history on the piano. Beautiful little cat.

Another pianist from Chicago who influenced a whole generation of Chicago pianists was Chris Anderson, who was in your Pershing band in the Forties.

VF: Oh, man, the same difference. The same difference. I was playing this great big old skating rink at 63rd and King Drive, and here was a little cat standing over there. The piano player didn’t show up. I said, “George, we ain’t got no piano player, man.” He said, “Well, you play the piano.” And I was getting ready to play the piano, because I jive around a little bit on piano. And I heard a voice saying, “I’ll play the piano.” I said, “Who is this?” And it was this little cat. I said, “Come on over here, man.” Shoot, that little cat, man, he taught me things I never knew existed. See, he’s a harmonic genius. And he was crippled and blind, but he had all this strength and this heart, you know. I said, “Man, what…? So he stayed with me a long time, until he went to New York. A great, great player. Never got his due. But boy, he was doing things harmonically speaking that people are just now playing.

In the last few years he’s done trios with Ray Drummond and Billy Higgins, and really elaborated his sound.

VF: Yes. And speaking of Ahmad, now, he hung around Chris for a long time, see, before he went to New York. Before that thing he made at the Pershing that made him famous, “But Not For Me” and all that, he had been hanging with Chris. So Chris was one of the cats.

One of the great drummers in Chicago, who only did one incredibly badly recorded record, was Ike Day, who Max Roach used to speak about with great enthusiasm. I know you worked on the bandstand with him a lot.

He and I used to hang out; we’d go around playing tenor and drum ensembles together. He was a great drummer. Hhe was one of the first guys I had heard with all that polyrhythm type of playing; you know, sock cymbal doing one thing, bass drum another, snare drum another. He was very even-handed. Like the things Elvin does a lot of? Well, Ike did those way back in the ’40s and the late ’30s.

I know he liked Chick Webb, and he liked Max Roach. He was with Jug a long time. There was another tenor player around Chicago named Tom Archia, and they were in a club for a long time — and he was the drummer. He was very well-rounded. He swung. And the triplets you hear people playing, that’s really part of Ike Day’s style. He did it all the time. He had that quiet fire thing, which I notice all great drummers have. They can play dramatically but still not be blaring. It’s sort of like playing the trumpet. Playing the trumpet so it’s pleasing is hard thing to do — and still have drive and fire. So I think of the drums the same way. See, a lot of cats make a whole lot of noise. They’re not trying to make noise, but they’re geared to this high sound thing. Then other cats can play the same thing on the drums, but it’s much quieter. And of course, it moves the ladies, because you know, the ladies love that quiet, sweet thing with a lot of force, with a lot of fire. And of course, my darlings… I always try to please my darlings, baby!